Nonprofit Disaster Accountability

The epic earthquake in Haiti was notable for the horrific damage it left in its literal wake. The aftermath has been notable for the huge amounts of private money donated for relief efforts. The combination of urgency and ease of giving through tools like text messaging has added up to$644 million to date according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy. This is still considerably less than the $2 billion pledged by governments around the world according to Chronicle reporter Ian Wilhelm. Still that’s a heck of a lot of money donated to Haiti.

A heck of a lot of money without any accountability.

There have been recent efforts, such as Recovery.gov and the Disaster Accountability Project are web based efforts to track the expenditure of public funds.

Is this part of the Clinton/Bush Haiti Fund effort? Hard to tell, they appear to be still in the fundraising mode. It is curious to me as to why these kinds of focus point funds for disasters aren’t ready to go before disasters strike. Why don’t we just make a permanent past president’s fund for disasters that is ready to go within minutes of an effort to focus giving?

OK, back on topic. Some entity, somewhere needs to provide an outside accounting of how these private funds were used – otherwise, we won’t learn how to efficiently and effectively use an enormous amount of money to meet an enormous need in a timely way. And this effort needs to be as transparent as possible about the criteria for assessment and results. And it needs to start now.

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