Providing Much Needed Help. Anytime. Anywhere. To Anyone in Need.

In November 2022, a tornado tore through Idabel, Oklahoma, demolishing dozens of buildings, including the Kiamichi Family Medical Center. It’s a small, rural community and thankfully no one was killed. The news stopped covering the disaster almost immediately. But in Idabel, the aftermath of the tornado left the 9,000 patients the medical center had been serving in the low-income county without a much needed facility. One that took a 12-year fundraising campaign to build. 

Even before FEMA assessed the scope of damage, the nonprofit organization Direct Relief had issued an emergency operating grant of $50,000 to Kiamichi Medical Center to set up a temporary site for patients to continue to be treated. 

“We understand that the tornado didn’t make national news, but the storm completely altered the course of everyone’s life who lives there,” explains Tony Morain, the nonprofit’s VP of Communications, underscoring the nonprofit’s tagline of “Anytime. Anywhere. Anyone in Need.”

The grant is barely a blip in Direct Relief’s total humanitarian efforts, which last year included rapid responses to the earthquake in Turkey and Syria (the organization immediately provided $3 million in financial support plus 440 tons of medical aid) and the Maui wildfires (huge deliveries of emergency medical supplies and hundreds of thousands of dollars in operating grants to community groups). That was at the same time that its ongoing support of Ukraine’s civilians in the war-torn country continued on a daily basis, topping $1 billion in medicine and medical supplies by August – Direct Relief’s largest and most sustained humanitarian aid response in its 75-year history.

Direct Relief is uniquely capable of such simultaneous efforts by adopting technologies, tools, and practices from commercial businesses to operate more efficiently and effectively. Its state-of-the-art medical and pharmaceutical warehouse and wholesale global distribution facility was designed to increase their capacity to respond to increasingly larger needs in more places at the same time. 

“Direct Relief is performing a very government-like function, but in a very business-like manner, using only private resources applied through everything we’ve learned about operating a humanitarian supply chain over 75 years,” says Dean Axelrod, VP of Partnerships in Philanthropy.  

Even more importantly, the organization has been cultivating relationships around the globe for decades, not only during times of crisis, but with ongoing medical and humanitarian support. When a disaster does strike, there’s a pre-existing connection. 

“We were able to be in Ukraine on day one because of those very close relationships and deep understanding of how the facilities there operate in their communities, just as we have elsewhere,” Axelrod says. “We know the logistical requirements, understand how best to transport material aid, and are able to identify really impactful opportunities for funding with organizations that can make a little bit of money go a really long way and have major impacts right away.”