Our Story

In 2018, we volunteered with a grassroots aid group in Scotland that gathered second-hand donations and sent them out to refugee aid groups a few times a year. We witnessed firsthand what can be accomplished when communities come together to protect the dignity of marginalised people around the world. We met passionate humanitarians working hard to respond to crises and transport aid to people whose basic needs weren’t being met. We saw the advantages that grassroots aid organisations have over larger organisations: they’re enthusiastic, nimble, diverse, and extremely adept at galvanizing their local communities to get involved.

We also saw the challenges that grassroots groups faced pursuing their missions. Successfully moving humanitarian aid large distances between countries is complicated and requires real logistical expertise, which can be hard to come by. Sending groups with aid to donate (like the one we worked with) don’t have time to reach out to tens of direct aid groups in different countries to find an aid recipient with enough warehouse space. On the other side, receiving groups that serve beneficiaries directly don’t have the time or resources to contact tens of sending groups to try to source aid. And organisations all over the network face challenges with long-term planning, given the high turnover of volunteers and the unpredictability of geopolitical events that cause human migration. During our time in Scotland, we wondered what would be necessary to assist this network in meeting these challenges.

We realised that some of these challenges could be addressed by taking advantage of the scale of the network as a whole. In other words, we started thinking about how we could bring together the best of small-scale grassroots organising with the benefits that result from scale: greater logistics knowledge, more numerous network connections, easier long-term planning, and additional leverage over the price of shipping. Our vision was to build an online platform for aid groups to communicate needs, form new connections, and improve the effectiveness of aid supply chains.

With this vision in mind, we embarked on a 3-month listening tour to meet with as many grassroots organisations as possible across Europe. This step was absolutely critical to the formation of our organisation; it helped us to gain a better understanding of what the needs of aid organisations are and what feedback they had on our idea. The aid groups we met with during our listening tour liked our idea for an online platform long-term, but they also told us that a centralising layer connecting all of the independent aid groups in the network was more pressing. They needed more immediate support with sourcing, matching, and delivering aid, and they could benefit from an organisation that could see the bigger picture and move aid to wherever it was needed most.

Distribute Aid has spent the last four years becoming that organisation. In the beginning, groups we’d visited on our listening tour began to reach out to us to inquire about where to send aid or where to source aid. We connected groups where necessary and began to organise shipments for them. Over time, our network grew, both in size and geographical scope. So too did our capabilities and services. We now connect and empower more groups in more regions than ever before. The total value of goods we ship has increased 4x each year since 2019, culminating in our delivery of $14 million (retail value) worth of aid in fiscal year 2022. Along the way, we have developed solutions to complex logistical challenges, like when we published an open-source guide for exporting humanitarian aid from the UK after Brexit or the time we opened up shipping routes to Lebanon. We have also formalised our understanding of humanitarian needs within our network through a quarterly needs assessment survey and report. Today, Distribute Aid powers aid supply chains, connects communities, empowers humanitarians, and uses all of these abilities to respond to crises around the globe.

In addition to our day-to-day operations, we haven’t given up on building an online platform! We continue to build a platform that will allow us to automate some of the processes we’ve developed, increase our capacity, and scale the solutions we’ve created to other humanitarian challenges around the world. The platform will be so much better and more encompassing than it would have been in 2019 because we have spent four years developing logistics expertise, aid network relationships, and crisis response experience. We now feel confident that we can build a platform that will truly support the needs of our partners.

The future of Distribute Aid is bright, and we can’t wait to see what it holds!

With Kindness,

Sara Lönegård, Executive Director and Founder

Taylor Fairbank, Director of Growth and Co-Founder