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| Philanthropy |
In the Wake of the Tsunami
Marilen Cawad
07/01/2005
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Wendy Gordon Rockefeller was on vacation in a Caribbean resort last winter,
enjoying the white sands and the calm waters, when she overheard
several guests
discussing the tsunami in southern Asia. On Christmas
holiday, she had been
determined to keep herself detached from the
outside world. But she could not
resist going back to her hotel room
and tuning in to cable television, where she
saw the first images of
the disaster. How unnerving, she thought, to be in a
bucolic seaside
resort when thousands of miles away entire villages were being
washed
away by killer waves.
Throwing aside her vacation, she logged into her
email and found a message from the staff at Trickle Up, the
microenterprise
development organization over which she presides. The
message explained that the
group was watching the situation unfold to
see if there was anything it could
do.
TOP VIEW
Philanthropists sprang into action following last winter’s catastrophic tsunami
in South Asia. Today they are reexamining their efforts to determine best
practices for the next disaster. They are busily weighing the cost-benefit
analysis of various charity strategies, including direct aid to indigenous
groups and donations to large humanitarian organizations, while seeking to
better prepare to provide logistical support after the next disaster strikes. | When she arrived back in New York,
Rockefeller, a longtime philanthropist
and wife of John D.
Rockefeller’s grandson Larry, attended an emergency board
meeting to
decide how the organization would respond to the disaster. The board
established the Tsunami Assistance Fund; Rockefeller was the first to
contribute, though she refuses to divulge the amount. “I wanted my gift
to help
in the rebuilding efforts,” Rockefeller says, “like providing
livelihoods for
the survivors in the disaster areas.”
The
Trickle Up fund, through a
partnership with Sri Lanka’s thrift and
credit cooperative SANASA, will provide
equity or seed capital and
business development training to help tsunami victims
in that country
become micro-entrepreneurs. The survivors will be trained to run
microenterprises; they will save and reinvest a portion of their
profits in
their business and qualify for loans. The pooled savings
will, in turn, be
available to others for their seed capital needs. As
of mid-April, the Tsunami
Assistance Fund for Sri Lanka had amassed
$120,000, managed by Trickle Up.
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