How ex-USAID staffers turned crisis into action and mobilized $110M

Former USAID staffers who lost their jobs in this year’s dismantling of the agency have quickly built one of the sector’s most closely watched experiments in bridging the aid gap — and it just hit a major milestone. On Wednesday, Project Resource Optimization, or PRO, announced that it has mobilized more than $110 million in philanthropic capital to sustain cost-effective health and humanitarian programs suddenly left without U.S. government support when the agency shuttered. And it mobilized that money in just over six months. With a new anonymous gift, every project identified in PRO’s first wave of opportunities has now received funding that will keep it running for the next 12 months. That means some 41 million people in more than 30 countries will continue receiving life-saving aid despite the loss of USAID funding. “This started as an important but more narrow conversation with donors trying to figure out, how do I optimize my giving in this time?” said Sasha Gallant, a member of the PRO team who formerly led USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures, or DIV. She spoke at Devex Impact House, Devex’s event on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly and Climate Week. “There was not one donor asking this question. There were not three donors asking this question. Every donor was asking this question, right? Like, what do we do now? And so we realized the best thing to do was actually to try to make as comprehensive an answer as possible, for as many people as possible, as quickly as possible,” she said. PRO began as a rapid triage effort, responding to the Trump administration’s stop-work orders that meant immediate cuts to funding across USAID programs. USAID staffers who had focused on the cost-effectiveness of interventions — or using data to determine which programs would offer the most bang for the buck — were getting calls from foundations asking where to direct their resources. The private funders sought to pick up projects interrupted by the cuts to U.S. foreign aid. Gallant and her colleagues headed to ForeignAssistance.gov, downloaded the full USAID project portfolio, then worked to identify the proven interventions most at risk of shutting down. The result was what PRO describes as its urgent and vetted list — from malnutrition treatment to HIV medicine delivery to antenatal care in conflict zones — that donors could fund immediately with confidence. Kara Weiss, executive director of CRI Foundation, which funds global health programs in Africa, said the PRO initiative shows both the potential and the limits of philanthropy in filling gaps in traditional development aid. “It was really clear to me that the best thing that private philanthropy could do was to get out of its own way. Sometimes you just need to act. And in order to do that, we needed some basic information from trusted sources,” she said. “People talk a lot about trust-based philanthropy, and I think this was a really good example of trust-based partnerships.” Helen Keller Intl has received tens of millions in funding from PRO to continue its work on malnutrition in Nepal, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and neglected tropical diseases in West Africa. Shawn Baker, Helen Keller’s chief program officer and formerly USAID’s chief nutritionist, noted that the continuity PRO has provided, along with other donors stepping up, has made the difference between scaling back lifesaving nutrition programs and keeping them alive on the ground. “This has been the largest infusion of money to stop some of the hemorrhaging caused by these terminations,” said Baker. But this is just one example of how private donors have mobilized resources to save programs at risk of shutting down, he said, also recognizing those who increased unrestricted funding. “It’s been an incredibly emotional journey, and we’re just incredibly grateful that in this moment of crisis, people have stepped up.” Originally conceived as a stopgap, buying a few weeks for programs on the brink, PRO is now looking ahead. In just over six months, the initiative has connected private donors to what it sees as the 81 most cost-effective former USAID projects that would have otherwise been halted. Now, PRO, which is now being hosted by the Center for Global Development, is asking more partners to join this effort to ensure that evidence-based and cost-effective programs can continue their work. Gallant said PRO’s funding milestone is both a cause for celebration and a sobering reminder of what remains undone. “I absolutely want to celebrate this moment, and I also want to be careful not to overly extrapolate from it at this time,” she said. Many lifesaving programs couldn’t make the first cut, in part because aid implementers needed to be in the field delivering, not spending endless hours filling out forms when there might not be a donor on the other side of the phone, Gallant explained. “Is there more that can be done? Are there other programs that should be here?” she said. “But also, how are we continuing to kind of move the field to thinking about cost efficiency and cost effectiveness in the allocation of a smaller and smaller resource pool?”