Most disaster giving goes to relief efforts, not rebuilding
The COVID-19 pandemic greatly accelerated a long-running pattern in giving by foundations and charities for health and natural disasters, a new Chronicle analysis of nine years of data show.
Ninety percent of the $5.2 billion donated in 2020, the most recent year for which data is available, went to dealing with immediate disaster needs. In other years, about half of disaster grantmaking went to such purposes. The rest went to helping communities prepare for hurricanes, droughts, life-threatening spread of disease, and other problems as well as to recovery and rebuilding.
The amount of money foundations and charities gave in response to COVID-19 is stunning compared with the past. The 2020 figures are 15 times as much as the contributions in 2019. To be sure, grantmakers aren’t keeping up that pace: Preliminary figures for more recent giving show that foundations are slowing their giving considerably.
The review of data from the Center for Disaster Philanthropy and Candid, a research organization that tracks giving of all kinds, shows that the sums flowing to disasters aren’t always going where they are most needed, namely for longterm recovery efforts and ensuring that communities are resilient enough to withstand the growing number of natural disasters caused by climate change.
Private and community foundations, along with United Ways and other groups, gave $5.2 billion to disaster relief in 2020 compared with $352 million in 2019, primarily due to the urgency and the severity of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“There’s nobody who wasn’t affected in some way by the pandemic,” says Tanya Gulliver-Garcia, director of learning and partnerships at the Center for Disaster Philanthropy. “And I think philanthropy saw that as a moment to step up and make a change and respond.”
The money went to a wide variety COVID relief efforts, such as vaccine research, hunger relief, and direct cash payments to people in need.
Grace Sato, Candid’s director of research, says that it is already clear that the increase in giving fueled by Covid-19 has subsided.
A survey of foundations released by Candid in May found that Covid-related funding declined by 31 percent from 2020 to 2021.
Other major epidemics have led to spikes in disaster giving in the past nine years: The second highest was after the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014, which attracted $158 million.