Beautiful photographs! I’m working on a personal project and am looking for an open road type picture to animate a car moving along. Basically I am going to try and move/scale a car along the road as the page scrolls. Would you mind if I use the WA highway pic? Site is not active yet, but will be at http://www.thatcar.com.au when it is complete. Cheers, Mark

A point that I would add to the conversation that you only touched on peripherally: the use of ongoing, long-term corporate GIK donors to replenish pre-positioned stock in existing disaster response warehouses may actually be one effective way of reducing long-term procurement costs for first-response items (hygiene kits etc.). This also removes the problem of slow responsiveness, as GIK just becomes another regular resource stream into pre-positioned warehouses on a schedule divorced from immediate need, ready to be deployed from the warehouse when necessary. (It does raise several other logistical sticking points such as ensuring Sphere-standard-compliant items, managing stock expiry, ensuring the cost/benefit ratio actually makes sense etc. but these are largely process and donor management issues rather than development ones.)

Basically, GIK can only work if it is just another reliable procurement stream to obtain predetermined high-need items, ie. need driven, not donor driven. There ARE sweet spots where the mutual interests of the two coincide, which can lead to sustainable, long-term partnerships that are beneficial for both NGOs (reducing overheads etc.) and donors (smoother inventory management, improved staff/customer engagement), but these partnerships need to be set up and managed by sophisticated donor engagement professionals who also understand the development industry implicitly, a rare combination even in the NGO landscape.

This, of course, reinforces your (and David’s) point that non-cash resourcing — like everything else in disaster responses (and really in development in general), and like the analogy David makes to fire departments — is actually a highly technical activity that should be carried out by trained and experienced professionals, and simply cannot be an ad-hoc amateur exercise carried out in the name of good intentions.

How can we correct this?

Your story of the people who arrive three trucks reminds me of another problem, written about here:
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/05/rescuers_turning_into_victims_lessons_from_first_responders_on_saving_people.html
In some kinds of catastrophe, more first responders are killed than actual victims.

Often, these amateur “first responders” end up needing care and attention better directed to the actual victims. Perhaps we need for disasters, advice similar to the advice given by some fire departments:

In case of disaster:
1. Get out
2. Call for professional assistance
3. Once out, STAY OUT.

One other confounding issue with SWEDOW is that some not for profits deliberately encourage GIK (even though some within the organisation may know that it won’t be particularly useful to the communities with whom they work) because they can record the value of the donated goods as income in their financial accounts, thereby increasing their ratio of income to administration costs. So while donors remain keen to donate cash to the charity with the lowest percentage of admin costs and Boards are keen to raise as much as possible, this will create a perverse incentive to promote the donation of GIK.

Perhaps next time there is a humanitarian disaster, I’ll organise a clothes swap with a coin donation entry. That way I can raise money to donate and keep the supply chains free for more urgent supplies.

So please keep donating people, but do so with respect and dignity of those you are helping.