Rash: This Give to the Max Day, support groups that are a ‘shaft of sunlight’

Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes a mix of commentary online and in print each day. To contribute, click here.

•••

Think global, act local. It’s a common, commonsense mantra for many charitable organizations. And for some locally based, globally focused entities, the mission is to do both. Organizations like Minnesota-based Alight (originally the American Refugee Committee) and the Center for Victims of Torture (CVT), which for years have helped people across the street and across the world.

But unfortunately, and unnecessarily, their missions have been curtailed by Trump administration cuts in international-program funding.

Putting the issue in a geopolitical context, CVT’s CEO and President Simon Adams said, “We’re living through a time of tremendous global turmoil, with more than 123 million people around the world displaced by persecution, conflict and atrocities. Those of us who are on the front lines working with refugees, working with people who have fled because their houses have been bombed or the village has been ethnically cleansed or some other horror has befallen them — those of us who do that work know that it’s never been more badly needed than it is right now. And at a time when we should be scaling up, we’ve been downscaling and had to shut down programs providing essential care to people. And that’s heartbreaking.”

The scaling down in CVT’s case means more than a $10 million reduction in revenue out of a total $36 million budget this year. More meaningful than those dire dollar figures are the human ones: Last year, CVT Ethiopia saw 13,880 clients plus family members and was on track to help more this year in nine different locations. All have been closed. As was the CVT Jordan clinic, which provided mental health, social work and physiotherapy services to refugees from Syria, Sudan, Iraq and elsewhere in the Mideast. And CVT’s largest-capacity program providing training in 11 nations was closed by cuts.

The economic costs are calculable. The human ones are not. Adams pointed to a CVT program in a displacement camp in Ethiopia, where ethnic Tigrayans who had lost everything had also lost hope. Amid a wave of suicides, said Adams, “it was very clear to me that people were holding on by a thread, and that we were part of that thread. Well, that program was shut down overnight without warning, because the funding was cut.” About 430 staffers were furloughed around the world as “programs in refugee camps with some of the most vulnerable people in the world were shut down with no notice.”

One 14-year-old Ethiopian girl who had survived deep trauma and a suicide attempt asked her counselor, according to a CVT spokesperson, “Are you leaving me alone like the others? Am I going back to how I was before I met you?”

Those thoughts may have been replicated by refugees in South Sudan and Southeast Asia who were served by Alight, since programs there ceased after funding cuts.

Alight started the year with five U.S. government grants but lost two of them. Overall, Alight lost about $12 million in government funding, which was about 14% of its overall budget.

“Alight focuses on working with forcibly displaced people, those who have had to flee their homes due to conflict or climate change or natural disasters or severe social or economic exclusion,” explained Alight CEO Jocelyn Wyatt. Speaking from Nairobi, Wyatt said that the organization works with refugees and internally displaced people in about 20 countries. “You know what the world looks like,” said Wyatt. “We’re running health clinics and nutrition feeding centers in Sudan, which is perhaps the biggest humanitarian crisis today.”

Like CVT, Alight has had to let go of hundreds of staff members who not only aided their new neighbors but provided economic activity in their stressed areas. On a human level, Wyatt said, it means that the health clinic a mother took her child to is closed, or mosquito nets meant to combat malaria in Myanmar aren’t available, or tuberculosis treatments end. And thus, sometimes, so do lives.

And yet, as far-flung as Alight, CVT and other organizations go to help, home is never far from their thoughts. And those here at home have a unique opportunity on Thursday to help by taking part in Give to the Max Day, the annual giving holiday (and yearlong program) that since 2009 has had more than 750,000 donors give nearly $400 million to 14,000 nonprofits and schools.

Nearly every year records are set, of total dollars donated and organizations helped in quantifiable metrics. And in invaluable terms, of lives enriched (and in some cases, saved). CVT and Alight are just two of the extraordinary entities worthy of support, of course. And while one giving holiday, no matter how generous Minnesotans are, won’t make up for the profound problems in funding so many organizations face, every bit helps.

Indeed, Give to the Max Day is just one of the reasons why the Minnesota roots of these international organizations matter so much.

“It’s been a huge gift for us, honestly, to be based in Minnesota,” which Wyatt said is the home of Alight’s biggest philanthropic supporters and volunteer base. Amplifying that, an Alight supporter has offered to match Give to the Max Day funding up to $100,000.

Adams, recalling shuttering programs, said that “knowing full well the negative impact that was going to have on extremely vulnerable clients” that “one of the few shafts of sunlight breaking through the clouds was precisely that we had so many people in Minnesota who reached out to our staff, who reached out to our different departments, who reached out to me personally, and just said: ‘We are with you; we believe in what you are doing.’”