CARE USA shifts into fundraising overdrive when disaster strikes, but its day-to-day development plan keeps it at the forefront of humanitarian-aid organizations.

By Margaret Battistelli Gardner

“Certainly from a fundraising perspective, what we try very quickly to do is to work with our programmatic colleagues to understand the scope of the disaster, to determine the nature of what CARE’s response is going to be in it and to try to make an initial read as to what kinds of funds might be required,” he adds. “And in the case of the tsunami, we knew that the funds required were going to be very significant, and we knew that very quickly.”