They call themselves the “lifeboat crew”. After losing their jobs abruptly when the Trump administration slashed US overseas aid earlier this year, a group of dedicated workers decided to launch their own rescue package.
Refusing to “wallow in misery”, Rob Rosenbaum, a former USAID economist, and a group of like-minded former agency staff began efforts to save some of the vital programmes that faced closure after the cuts.
Now, almost 80 projects have been saved by a matchmaking service run by Rosenbaum and other former USAID staff, that has found them $110m (£82m) of new funding. The team behind the Project Resource Optimization(Pro) initiative estimates it will benefit 40 million people, including many children under five.
After USAID closed, spending was frozen, thousands of employees were laid off, and projects worldwide either came to a shuddering halt or were left limping towards what Rosenbaum terms “drop-dead dates”.
Rosenbaum and some of his colleagues were approached by a foundation that “wanted to figure out how they could make the best use of their limited resources”.
They created a menu from the list of cancelled projects, identifying those “delivering the most life-saving aid per dollar” and where a new funder could feasibly step in and keep things going.
They soon realised the demand was wider than that initial foundation and started to approach other potential donors.
“We called ourselves the lifeboat crew at the beginning,” says Rosenbaum. “The ship has been sinking, and there aren’t enough lifeboats for every project to get on, and so we’re trying to literally save as many babies as we can, get as many on to these lifeboats as possible, via the projects that are delivering aid.”
Pro, now working as part of the Center for Global Development thinktank, has secured funding for 79 projects on its list in more than 30 countries. Three have had USAID funding restored. Nine were not able to be saved in time.
The former USAID federal office in Washington, DC in April, after Trump ordered it to be closed down. Photograph: Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images
Funding has come from a mix of philanthropic foundations and wealthy individuals. Most wish to remain anonymous.
“They come from very different reasons and perspectives, but the common thread that we’ve heard from them is, ‘I feel horrified by what’s going on. I really want to figure out a way to step in,’” says Rosenbaum.
“I think that there was an ‘aha’ moment for all of us as we started working on this, that this created an opportunity to pivot from the ice-cream on the couch, wallowing in the misery of everything that was happening around us, to having something productive to really sink our teeth into.”
One project that has found funding through Pro is work by the Alliance for International Medical Action (Alima) to provide services including treatment for severe acute malnutrition, maternity services and vital childhood vaccines in Mali.
It is vital to keep such programmes going, says Rosenbaum, not only because restarting operations if they stopped would be hugely expensive but also because of how much trust would be lost in the conflict-ravaged areas if Alima withdrew.
“Alima told us […] ‘we’re very worried that if we walk away, we may never be invited back.’”
Projects with longer-term goals, such as strengthening health systems, or in other fields such as education, have not been part of Pro’s work. It also does not seek to save the projects indefinitely but to “buy time for the organisations and, frankly, the broader ecosystem, to figure out a longer-term solution”.
Having found funding for all projects on its initial list, Pro says it will now focus on reaching more people with “proven, cost-effective interventions”.
