2/16/23 Chronicle of Philanthropy: Turkey-Syria Earthquake Hits a Region in Crisis U.S. Donors Have Long Neglected. Will That Change?
By Drew Lindsay
Chronicle of Philanthropy
February 16, 2023
If U.S. donors step in to help the long-term recovery from last week’s earthquake in Turkey and Syria, they will invest in a part of the world and a crisis they have long neglected.
That’s according to disaster aid experts as well as organizations working in southern Turkey and northwestern Syria. Syria’s civil war has been the epicenter of perpetual crises in the region since it began in 2011, with some 13 millionpeople displaced — a number expected to grow considerably in the quake’s aftermath.
Yet aid for refugees in Turkey and that part of Syria has been episodic, reaching lows in recent years as the global Covid pandemic and the Ukraine war attracted donors’ attention.
“Unfortunately, when an emergency is hitting its 12th year, in many cases it’s forgotten,” says Ourania Dionysiou, vice president for international philanthropy and partnerships at the International Rescue Committee. “What we are trying to remind people is that there is this hidden, forgotten crisis within this crisis that’s about to get worse.”
Latest estimates put the earthquake’s death toll at 41,000 — double the nearly 20,000 killed by the 2011 earthquake that created a tsunami that hit Japan’s coast. It is the eighth-deadliest tremor since 1950 and the worst since the 2010 Haitian quake that killed 316,000.
Early Giving
The U.S. charitable response so far offers a mixed forecast of the giving to come. Dionysiou of the IRC says donations from the first 48 hours through email, social-media, and online appeals outpaced the initial volume following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a year ago. The organization expects overall donations to match what’s typical for a disaster of this size.
Doctors Without Borders has raised $11.1 million online in the United States — three times more than the early digital response on Ukraine and nine times more than the total from the first days of its pandemic-related appeals in March 2020.
Unlike in Ukraine, where the organization didn’t have much of a presence before the war, the medical aid charity had 500 staff in Syria when the earthquake hit and provided reports and images quickly. “The fact that our emergency medical teams were able to act immediately, treating patients right away, was an important factor,” says executive director Avril Benoît.
Donations to CARE have reached about $5.3 million — roughly a third of what it raised immediately after the Russian invasion of Ukraine last year. The United States — particularly the media — has not reckoned with the earthquake as a major disaster, says Deepmala Mahla, vice president of humanitarian affairs. Donations are inextricably tied to media coverage, Mahla says, and “the news is covering some balloon,” referencing the U.S. shoot-down of a Chinese surveillance air vehicle.
“I’m just plain surprised,” Mahla says. “How can this not get attention?”
The Center for Disaster Philanthropy reports that individual major donors are stepping up. A man from Pakistan living in America anonymously donated $30 million to the Turkish embassy in the United States — the largest gift made so far by an individual, foundation, or corporation, according to research by Candid. Hamdi Ulukaya, the Turkish-born CEO of Chobani, has pledged at least $2 million to relief efforts.
Among corporate commitments, the Ikea Foundation has donated $10.7 million to Doctors Without Borders.
Compared with the early days of Ukraine or the Covid pandemic, however, institutional philanthropy seems slow to respond, Tanya Gulliver-Garcia, the center’s director of learning and partnerships, said in an email. “Philanthropy, including high-wealth individuals, needs to step up and help if we’re to see either country have hope of a strong recovery.”
Cryptoinvestors also don’t appear to be stepping up in the same way they did for Ukraine relief, owing in part to last year’s sharp drop in the value of most digital currencies and the subsequent decline in cryptofundraising by nonprofits, according to Pat Duffy, CEO of the Giving Block, a company that helps nonprofits raise and convert cryptogifts.
Endaoment, a community foundation-like nonprofit that houses donor-advised funds, says it has raised only about $30,000 so far for earthquake relief. The philanthropic response to last year’s Russian invasion “was truly unique in its scale,” wrote CEO Robbie Heeger in an email. “We aren’t seeing the same upswell of widespread activism amongst donors.”
‘Permacrisis’ Concerns
The charitable response to the Ukraine crisis offers an example of the deep, longstanding support that organizations hope to see in Turkey and Syria. Giving exploded in the first days of the war, and routine media coverage since has fueled a relatively steady stream of donations for many groups. More than $2.8 billion has been raised in pledges and grants globally, according to Candid.
International Medical Corps has raised $75 million for its Ukraine efforts in the past year. “It’s completely unprecedented,” says chief advancement officer Rebecca Milner.
Replicating that fundraising feat for earthquake recovery will be difficult. Unlike with the Ukraine war, the media will soon focus on another part of the world as the slow, less dramatic work of recovery begins. Also, there’s a glut of disasters globally that some fundraisers worry is already leading to what they say is “compassion fatigue.” In the past 18 months, Americans have seen horrific images from disaster events such as the floods in California and Pakistan, Hurricane Ian in Florida, the Ukraine war, and the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.
“As a global community, we’re almost in a state of ‘permacrisis,’” Milner says. International Medical Corps has raised more than $7 million so far, which Milner says meets expectations. The response is on par, she says, with donations to the organization following Hurricanes Irma and Maria, which hit Puerto Rico in quick succession in 2017 and devastated its electricity and water systems and killed nearly 3,000 people..
Persuading philanthropy to invest in long-term recovery from any disaster is never easy. A Chronicle of Philanthropyanalysis of nine years of disaster-related grant making found that the bulk goes for immediate relief. In most years, the share of dollars earmarked for reconstruction and recovery amounted to less than 20 percent; sometimes, it dropped as low as 2 percent.
The past decade’s ebb-and-flow in aid to the refugee crisis doesn’t suggest American philanthropy will readily invest over the long run in Turkey or Syria. The Arab Muslim world is likely to step up to help, says Emily Troutman, an investigative journalist who covers disaster aid. But donors in the United States lack the strong connections to either country that would prompt an outpouring of support akin to that in Ukraine and what followed Haiti’s 2010 earthquake. “Haiti’s different; it has a long history with America,” Troutman says. “A lot of Haitians live here.”
“Turkey is probably a mid-interest country for the U.S. in terms of philanthropy,” says Ben Smilowitz, executive director of the Disaster Accountability Project, which connects donors to local relief groups. A strong network of local organizations works along Turkey’s border with Syria to handle assistance to millions of refugees. That network could be mobilized effectively for earthquake relief, but “it’s still rather unknown to many philanthropies that don’t operate in the international giving space all the time.”
Recovery will be all the more difficult and costly because of Syria’s fragility after more than a decade of war, widespread poverty, and dislocation. The country’s plight deepened in recent years as the Ukraine war limited its food imports. In August, cholera broke out, with cases concentrated in the northwest.
“The sheer volume of the crisis was just massive even before the earthquake,” says Leslie Archambeault, managing director of humanitarian policy at Save the Children. “It’s 12 years of conflict with no real end in sight.”
Political conditions in Syria, which faces economic sanctions by the United States and other western countries, can be daunting to donors. Logistics are difficult in the rebel-held northwest part of the country, where the government controls access. Infighting among nonstate factions as well as shelling by government forces threaten the safety of aid workers.
“There’s always a question in the mind of somebody who wants to support a region like that: Will my donation really reach those who need it most?” says Benoît of Doctors Without Borders. “Will there be diversion of aid?”
The country’s schism also complicates stories that might inspire donors to give. Support for Ukraine was fueled in part by a narrative of the heroic, outgunned Ukranians battling a bully, Russia, led by the power-crazed Vladimir Putin, says Kent Annan, co-director of the Humanitarian Disaster Institute at Wheaton College outside Chicago. “Once the narrative gets complicated, generosity can get harder.”