Humanitarian Action Fellow 2023-24

MIKE DELANEY: Hi, my name is Mike Delaney. I'm a Humanitarian Action Fellow at the Harvard Divinity School. The world is at a critical moment with regards to humanitarian assistance, because of the situation with the climate, and also with conflict. Never in the history have we seen such a demand for humanitarian response.  

There were two formative experiences early on in my career that really helped shape my worldview on humanitarian response. One was in Tijuana, Mexico, when I was working in community development. I was actually working in the dumps, the garbage dumps of Tijuana. And I witnessed organizations with very good intent, church organizations coming in from the United States, and providing aid and relief to people who are living in the dump, and working in the dump recycling goods.  

But the interesting thing was that the way that they were giving that aid, they were requiring the people to hand over their children so that those providing the aid would actually wash their children. And it was a very difficult moment for those parents, who love their children, to actually turn them over to someone else, and watched them be bathed by those who were giving the aid.  

The same thing happened-- another negative result happened as well, that people were giving aid, but they were only giving it to people who lived in the dump. But what that did was actually people started to come into the dump and establish their homes. And so while they had good intent, the consequences were quite negative, both on a personal and on a community level.  

At the same time, years later I was working in a refugee camp, and people who were in that camp just arrived. Many of them were starving, had gone almost 15 days without food. And finally, aid was brought to them. And they opened the aid, and opened-- they were cans. They thought they were going to be meat or goods. And it turned out it was American cheese. And they didn't know what it was, or how even to eat it. And even though they were literally starving, they rejected that aid.  

And so the idea that humanitarian assistance was given without even asking, in both of these occasions, what people needed, was very powerful, and actually drove me in my understanding of how to approach humanitarian assistance for the rest of my career.  

But 40 years on from those experiences, those questions still haunt me, because the humanitarian sector has grown exponentially, particularly since World War II when the UN was established, and many of the international organizations were established, NGOs, and humanitarian groups. In the last 20 years, humanitarian need was about $2 billion 20 years ago. Right now, the UN estimates that the needs are $46 billion.  

The organizations that are providing humanitarian response have grown as well. But the same issues remain. Many of those large international organizations are still not asking the questions, what do local people need? And in particular, local organizations, local leaders, many times church leaders, faith leaders are not consulted on what are the needs of local people.  

What could make an impact now, that could also make a sustainable impact in the future? And so that is my burning question. How can we bring change to the humanitarian sector that puts local people, local leaders, local faith leaders in the driver's seat, designing, implementing, and carrying out humanitarian response, instead of people from the outside telling people what they need.