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Disaster Philanthropy Doesn't Only Need More Money. It Needs More Coordination.
Every hurricane season, every wildfire season, every flood, the same scene repeats itself across philanthropy: a hundred group texts and email threads, all asking some version of the same question. Does anyone know who's already funding on the ground? Has anyone talked to the folks doing this work before?
By the time an answer surfaces, the moment it would have mattered most has usually passed.
That's the gap Ashley Lukens has spent years building infrastructure to close. As part of Funder Hui, she's helped networks of funders in Hawai'i move past the scramble that defines so much disaster response, and turn it into something closer to a system. We sat down with her to talk through what that actually takes, and turned the conversation into a new series: Disaster Philanthropy, Reimagined.
The premise is simple, even if the sector rarely lives up to it: fifty funders can share the exact same values and still show up on the ground as chaos, because they're running on fifty different applications, fifty different timelines, fifty different sets of priorities. Nonprofits end up filling out the same information over and over while funders can't see who's already covered and who's been missed entirely. More money moving through that kind of static doesn't necessarily mean more relief reaching people. Coordination is what makes it count.
In our conversation, Ashley walks through four shifts that turn scattered giving into coordinated response through JustFund, all built on infrastructure already moving money at scale: a shared application, so nonprofits tell their story once instead of eighteen times in eighteen different formats while they're also trying to respond to a crisis; aligned tracking, so funders can see where the overlaps and gaps actually are instead of guessing; frontline decision-making, so the people closest to a crisis, not the funders furthest from it, direct where dollars go first; and funding that outlasts the news cycle, because most disaster dollars land in the first 72 hours, while recovery can take years.
None of this is theoretical. When funders needed to respond to a disaster in Hawai'i, shared infrastructure let them coordinate as one response instead of running forty separate ones. We've watched a version of the same shift happen in Atlanta when twenty funders built a shared, transparent process during COVID that let them see each other's giving for the first time, and it changed how all twenty gave, together, moving over $5.5 million to nonprofit organizations in a coordinated way. The pattern holds whether the crisis is a hurricane or a pandemic: funders who can see each other's work move faster, and move it to the right places.
If you're rethinking how your funding moves when the next disaster hits, or you're just beginning to ask what coordination could look like for your organization and networks, these resources are for you.
We turned the conversation into a guide to all four shifts you can share with your team, your board, or your trusted networks.
Sign up now to download the Four Shifts guide.
-The JustFund Team
All Guides
Disaster Philanthropy Doesn't Only Need More Money. It Needs More Coordination.
Every hurricane season, every wildfire season, every flood, the same scene repeats itself across philanthropy: a hundred group texts and email threads, all asking some version of the same question. Does anyone know who's already funding on the ground? Has anyone talked to the folks doing this work before?
By the time an answer surfaces, the moment it would have mattered most has usually passed.
That's the gap Ashley Lukens has spent years building infrastructure to close. As part of Funder Hui, she's helped networks of funders in Hawai'i move past the scramble that defines so much disaster response, and turn it into something closer to a system. We sat down with her to talk through what that actually takes, and turned the conversation into a new series: Disaster Philanthropy, Reimagined.
The premise is simple, even if the sector rarely lives up to it: fifty funders can share the exact same values and still show up on the ground as chaos, because they're running on fifty different applications, fifty different timelines, fifty different sets of priorities. Nonprofits end up filling out the same information over and over while funders can't see who's already covered and who's been missed entirely. More money moving through that kind of static doesn't necessarily mean more relief reaching people. Coordination is what makes it count.
In our conversation, Ashley walks through four shifts that turn scattered giving into coordinated response through JustFund, all built on infrastructure already moving money at scale: a shared application, so nonprofits tell their story once instead of eighteen times in eighteen different formats while they're also trying to respond to a crisis; aligned tracking, so funders can see where the overlaps and gaps actually are instead of guessing; frontline decision-making, so the people closest to a crisis, not the funders furthest from it, direct where dollars go first; and funding that outlasts the news cycle, because most disaster dollars land in the first 72 hours, while recovery can take years.
None of this is theoretical. When funders needed to respond to a disaster in Hawai'i, shared infrastructure let them coordinate as one response instead of running forty separate ones. We've watched a version of the same shift happen in Atlanta when twenty funders built a shared, transparent process during COVID that let them see each other's giving for the first time, and it changed how all twenty gave, together, moving over $5.5 million to nonprofit organizations in a coordinated way. The pattern holds whether the crisis is a hurricane or a pandemic: funders who can see each other's work move faster, and move it to the right places.
If you're rethinking how your funding moves when the next disaster hits, or you're just beginning to ask what coordination could look like for your organization and networks, these resources are for you.
We turned the conversation into a guide to all four shifts you can share with your team, your board, or your trusted networks.
Sign up now to download the Four Shifts guide.
-The JustFund Team