World Concern’s Susan Tal­bot recently trav­eled to Haiti to help bring in donated items for fam­i­lies suf­fer­ing after the earthquake.

A lot can be done with a phone, email and good rela­tion­ships. In the case of World Concern’s Susan Tal­bot, she’s been able to use her skills to gen­er­ate $61 mil­lion worth of human­i­tar­ian aid for the poor in the last year. That’s $61,000,000 worth of in Gift-In-Kind (GIK) dona­tions, which is any­thing donated that is not money.

$61 mil­lion is tough to put into per­spec­tive. But con­sider that this is help­ing nearly 5 mil­lion peo­ple. It’s 5 mil­lion peo­ple who have received a vari­ety of resources, includ­ing med­ica­tion for intesti­nal worms, a wheel­chair to find mobil­ity again, or a com­puter to become con­nected to the dig­i­tal age for the very first time.

“All of our GIK is field dri­ven,” Susan told me. “I don’t start col­lect­ing items until our staff tells me they need items. We don’t just hand out stuff in the field. It all has to have a func­tion or col­lab­o­rate with what we are doing. It needs to have a pur­pose rather than just giv­ing out commodities.”

Where does Susan get these GIK human­i­tar­ian dona­tions? They come from many sources, includ­ing schools, farm­ers, busi­nesses — and med­ical sup­ply companies.

Bring­ing in com­modi­ties is a tricky busi­ness, though, because when you are try­ing to help a com­mu­nity, you could end up hurt­ing it instead. The way Susan and the rest of the World Con­cern team does it, though, is care­fully considered.

“We pro­vide sup­plies in a cri­sis, like food, when the mar­ket­place is not func­tion­ing,” Susan says. “When com­modi­ties are avail­able locally, we try to avoid giv­ing away those things. It works against what we are doing. It makes no sense to sup­port women in a micro­fi­nance shoe busi­ness, and then bring in a ship­ment of shoes.”

Build­ing rela­tion­ships with the peo­ple we serve is impor­tant. Skill-building is impor­tant. Teach­ing peo­ple is impor­tant. World Con­cern does that, equip­ping peo­ple to know how to stand on their own two feet once we are fin­ished work­ing with their com­mu­nity. Susan knows though that com­ing along­side peo­ple in need with a tan­gi­ble good, though, can help change — or even save — a life.

Learn more about our Haiti response.

Con­tact Susan.

Sourced from: Humanitarian Aid and Relief

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