GlobalGiving

Our mission is to transform aid and philanthropy to accelerate community-led change. Community-led organizations leverage local knowledge, relationships, and assets. They are oriented toward community timelines and goals instead of externally imposed schedules and performance indicators. They understand community needs, culture, and means of enacting change.

That is why we focus our platform, services, and products on enabling community-led changemakers around the world to succeed. We aim to create a world where anyone who has an idea about how to improve their community can access resources, networks, tools, and information they need to fund and optimize their work.

At GlobalGiving, we recognize that change starts within, and to transform the world, we first must become more community-led ourselves.

To drive dramatically more funding to nonprofits and community leaders around, while also protecting their accountability to the communities they serve, we will continue to be a trusted partner for key players in the philanthropic space, including donors, nonprofit leaders, and corporate decision makers. We will invest in and improve essential capabilities for remaining a trusted partner, including program design, vetting, grantmaking, and disbursement at a global scale. We will also invest in core systems that enable giving to be safe, fun, and easy across borders.

We have three levers that help us reach our long-term goals: systems, staff, and partners. We have developed custom systems to facilitate safe, fast, and easy exchange of money, information, and ideas around the world. Our top-notch team has a wide variety of expertise, from managing large corporate giving programs to improving our website, to supporting small nonprofits. Finally, we rely on a strong network of partners to help us evolve and be community-led ourselves. This network of partners includes thousands of nonprofit leaders in 175+ countries around the world.

Since our founding in 2002, GlobalGiving has raised more than $811M for more than 33,394 charitable projects in 175+ countries. Our comprehensive response to the war and humanitarian crisis in Ukraine is a strong example of GlobalGiving’s place as a trusted connector between donors and local leaders at the forefront of response and recovery. Our robust, local network in Ukraine enabled us to send our first emergency grants to the region just days after Russia’s biggest invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. By the end of 2022, we had distributed more than 300 grants to nonprofit partners working in Ukraine and neighboring countries. We hit new heights of resource mobilization and allocation in 2022, raising a record-breaking $150M for urgent causes in a single year.

Following the completion of an extensive research process into what it means to be community-led in 2020, we published the results and then committed to looking inward to become more community-led ourselves. One example of our progress in being more community-led ourselves is our co-creation of a new onboarding process for nonprofit partners with nonprofits partners, which we undertook in 2021 with a group of social change leaders and introduced in 2022. We welcomed 130 new organizations as GlobalGiving partners in 2022 through the resulting Pathway program—many of which are from regions previously underrepresented in our community.