“Perfection is the enemy of the good when it comes to emergency management. Speed trumps perfection,” said Dr Michael Ryan, Executive Director of the World Health Organization’s Health Emergencies Program, at a briefing on the COVID-19 outbreak. “Be fast and have no regrets,” he said.

Dr Ryan was calling on decision-makers in all sectors to be proactive in dealing with the COVID-19 crisis. So how should the social sector heed these words? How can a sector that is broadly accustomed to slow grant processes and multi-year projects step up to rapidly fund responses to the COVID-19 crisis?

Future of Good asked the thoughts of Sean Lowrie, creator and former director of the Start Network headquartered in the United Kingdom. Its Start Fund provides rapid funding to relief efforts for humanitarian crises. Launched in 2014, the fund disburses money for humanitarian projects within 72 hours of an alert, which makes it the fastest, collectively-owned, early response mechanism in the world, according to Lowrie.  

So how and why did the Start Network create this rapid financing model, and what lessons does it hold for Canada’s social impact funders in responding to the COVID-19 crisis?

 The Start Fund disburses money for humanitarian projects within 72 hours of an alert, which makes it the fastest, collectively-owned, early response mechanism in the world.

Reacting quickly

What sets the Start Fund model apart from the traditional humanitarian system is the speed by which it responds to crises, Lowrie said, as well as how it supports local organizations and tries to anticipate the crises they may face.

Any of the network’s 41 member agencies can raise an alert. The Start Fund decides whether to activate funds to the crisis, with the help of a global committee, and then qualifying agencies have 24 hours to submit an application for a portion of those funds. On the third day, a local committee, whose members know the context, chooses which projects receive funds. 

Originally conceived “in a pub” by smaller NGOs looking to combine to win government contracts, Lowrie said, the model developed into something far more innovative, in a sector beset with slow and reactive funding mechanisms. “72 hours was a total game-changer,” he said. “It blew the whole thing out of the water.” 

And with local practitioners making decisions, the Start Fund tries to “shift power in the humanitarian aid system to the edges,” said Lowrie, and spot crises that the system might miss. “There’s a media radar level that you’ve got to penetrate in order to gain public awareness and political attention that triggers the funding,” he explained. 

This even includes providing funding in anticipation of crises – proactive investment in response to shifting risks, instead of only reacting afterwards. The UN and the Red Cross now have similar anticipation funds, Lowrie said, and risk-financing has become increasingly commonplace.

Start simple

Building this model, Lowrie has learned a great deal about what works and what doesn’t in rapid funding mechanisms. As the social impact sector looks at ways to quickly gather funds to address COVID-19’s impact on society, he had three important lessons to share.

Firstly, Lowrie said, create something which is simple as possible. “It requires you to hold your nerve a bit and design something that’s good enough,” he said. “You will iterate with experience.”

This lesson stems from Lowrie’s main self-criticism of the Start Fund model. “It was over-designed at the beginning,” he said. “The transaction costs are quite high, the procedures are quite laborious.”

Despite being less bureaucratic than many humanitarian funding mechanisms, cutting the amount of paperwork down substantially, he wishes they could have created something more efficient and uncomplex.

Secondly, “these things can get stuck,” said Lowrie, so organizations should review and reinvent how the rapid funding mechanisms are run every couple of years. “They become part of the status quo, and the world is not stuck,” he said. “You need to build in milestones where you review the governance of these mechanisms.”

With society facing a challenge of a scale not seen for generations, there has never been a more important time for the social impact sector to react with speed.  

The frontline

Finally, Lowrie said, funding beneficiaries should be involved in peer review and decision-making. “The key metric here is: can the recipients influence the design of the program that they’re going to receive?”

“If you put peers round the table,” he said, “you get much better funding decisions for a number of reasons about selecting the projects that are most appropriate.” Practitioners on the frontline understand the full context of an issue far better than executives or donors working for an international organization or a national NGO. 

The Start Fund, which had disbursed £59 million (CAD$100 million) overall by the end of 2019, is a very small player in the context of a humanitarian system which spends billions of dollars every year, but it shows what can be done to bypass the large, often unwieldy processes that have come to characterize the social impact world. 

With society facing a challenge of a scale not seen for generations, there has never been a more important time for the social impact sector to react with speed. The lessons seem to be clear: keep it simple, iterate as you go, and let your beneficiaries make the funding decisions.

And as Dr Ryan said, you can forget about perfection.

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