But in this season of bad news, there are some rays of light and hope here at NetHope. We are delighted to announce our new Digital Breakthrough Initiative in partnership with Cisco. Cisco, our oldest corporate partner, has reinvested in the next generation of NetHope’s work helping us reinvent our emergency response work around an agenda of preparedness, resiliency, and localization; helping launch a new Digital Protection effort to protect our NetHope Member organizations in a world of dramatically increasing cyber threats and crime; seeding new work on climate change while looking to identify digital and collective solutions at the intersection of NetHope’s unique community segments; and providing new core capacity building to help NetHope better serve its Members. This $15 million, 5-year grant will help NetHope help our Member organizations, the world’s leading impact nonprofits around the world achieve their missions in relief, development and conservation, better.
The NetHope Member community is also growing. At our April Member meeting just one short week ago, the community voted to accept three new Members: Helvetas, the oldest and largest development NGO in Switzerland, Food for the Poor, a large faith-based organization located in the United States with programming across the Caribbean basin, and France-based CGIAR, a global partnership of agricultural innovators for a food secure future. We welcome these organizations into the NetHope family and are looking forward to engaging them and their world class teams more deeply.
NetHope remains a place where world class peers can learn from one another, where the world’s leading technology innovators come together to support the humanitarian and conservation sectors, and where together we launch field and impact programming to do things that no one of us could do alone, and that provide valuable learning for those who would also seek to help.
Thank you for your participation in this community, and for your support of NetHope. There is no challenge too difficult when we are working together.
Warmly and in peace,
Lance
