When the Trump administration issued its January 20 executive order announcing that it was freezing all U.S. foreign development assistance—funding that typically accounts for about a third of Save the Children’s annual global program budget—our senior team was already gathered for a previously planned in-person retreat. Together, we quickly moved through every stage of grief.
First, denial: Was it even possible for a U.S. president to deny funds appropriated by Congress? Second, anger: How could the administration be so cruel as to cut off food, medicine, and education from children in need? Third, bargaining: Could we litigate or negotiate to get some of the money back? Fourth, depression: In the absence of U.S. aid, would we be able to continue our work? Finally, acceptance: We couldn’t avoid or reverse this massive crisis, but we would stay calm, creative, and agile—and eventually navigate our way through it.
The ensuing days were chaotic as we tried to understand what the initial directive and subsequent ones meant for our operations. What started as a 90-day pause on and review of all U.S. aid became, on January 24, a U.S. State Department suspension of all existing programs except for emergency food assistance and military aid to Egypt and Israel. Four days later, the exemptions were extended to “humanitarian programs that provide life-saving medicine, medical services, food, shelter and subsistence assistance.”
We quickly created a global, cross-functional task force to plan for various scenarios. Of the $400 million that Save the Children U.S. had expected to receive from the U.S. government and then distribute to our colleagues and partners who are feeding, vaccinating, and teaching kids around the world, how much would be left? At that time, we thought the best case would be 70%; the worst (and ultimately more accurate) was 20%. We evaluated all our programs against the administration’s criteria for work eligible to continue, and then our financial teams determined how to stretch our cash reserves to sustain as many programs as possible for as long as possible, considering that at that point we hadn’t been paid for work already finished (although we have been since).
In the subsequent months, we have moved on from that immediate “response” phase to one that I refer to as “rebound”: securing new sources of funding to make up for those we lost. I am keen to move Save the Children U.S.—and our entire sector—to a third phase, which I think of as “reform”: streamlining, collaborating on, and experimenting with different types of programs to improve our efficiency and effectiveness. This is the best way to both silence our critics and ensure that we continue to save and enhance children’s lives.
A Legacy of Aid
Save the Children was founded in 1919 by Eglantyne Jebb, a British woman spurred to action by newspaper photos of German and Austrian children left to starve behind Allied troops’ World War I blockades. Our U.S. arm was established in 1932 to help struggling families in Appalachia during the Great Depression. Since then, we have expanded to offer programs in 14 U.S. states and raise funds for programs in more than 100 countries, which means we impact the lives of over 100 million children each year.
I joined Save the Children International as deputy CEO in 2012 after a 15-year career in the private sector, working for Kimberly-Clark and Unilever in my home country of the Netherlands as well as in Indonesia, Singapore, and the United Kingdom. I’d long been interested in transitioning to humanitarian work, where my economics and finance training, global business experience, and cross-cultural skills would be of use. (I’m half-Dutch, half-Indonesian, and fluent in four languages.) So, when a headhunter called asking if I would consider a role overseeing the integration of all of Save the Children’s separate country groups and 24,000 staff members into a more cohesive and flexible global entity with consistent messaging, standards, and success metrics (something that I’d just helped execute at Unilever), I jumped at the opportunity.
After seven years leading that transformation at Save the Children International, I moved to Save the Children U.S. to become its president and COO; then in January 2020 I was appointed CEO, with oversight of all our domestic programs as well as U.S. fundraising, including advocating for those critical government contributions. At the time, I was proud of the improvements we’d made to our processes and systems, creating more-flexible funding and knowledge sharing across geographies, more accountability for program results, and a more resilient and sustainable supply chain. But I was also cognizant of the headwinds we faced.
Even then, funding was flatlining, while the number of children in need continued to grow. Last year, the Global Humanitarian Overview estimated that the United States and other countries had committed only about 16% of the more than $48 billion necessary to help people in need around the world. For comparison, in 2014 wealthy nations were meeting 60% to 70% of that need. Governments did increase aid to developing regions in 2020 and 2021 in response to the global pandemic and the start of the war in Ukraine, but it has fallen again in the years since, reflecting a shift from aid to defense spending in Europe and an unfortunate decline in political support, both there and in the U.S., for investing outside one’s own borders to help the less fortunate.
That was our situation in January, when President Trump took office for a second time, and we knew his administration would make further drastic cuts to international aid. We had all read Project 2025, the Republican plan for remaking the federal government. However, we thought—perhaps naively—that the decreases would be gradual. After all, the 2025 U.S. government budget cycle had been approved by Congress and aid funds allocated, so we expected the big financial hit to come in 2026 or later. Clearly, we were wrong.
Shock and Response
Humanitarian workers tend to be good in a crisis: We run to the fire instead of away from it, and it’s in our DNA to stay focused and agile amid chaos. So once our team had taken a few moments to process the news, we moved quickly into crisis management mode. I even pulled out my favorite book on coping with unexpected change—1998’s Who Moved My Cheese?—and shared it with my team. The message was: Our world has been upended. We might not like it, but we must accept it and move forward.
As the leadership team tried to determine which programs might still be eligible for U.S. government funding due to their lifesaving nature, which we could sustain using other money, and which we would need to shutter immediately, our finance group modeled different futures: How much of Save the Children could continue to operate with half or even a fifth of the money we’d expected from our biggest funder?
We couldn’t tell our thousands of colleagues around the world to simply hold tight while we figured it out. In some places they were treating babies so malnourished that, if they had stopped, the children would have died. Our goal was to maintain as many programs as we could, as well as to preserve long-term investments in functions that were now even more critical, such as private fundraising capabilities, data and digital improvements, and enterprise resource planning. That meant learning to manage our cash flow the way a scrappy retail business might.
During this period, I also connected with CEOs of other humanitarian organizations affected by the cuts, and we formed a sort of virtual war room to discuss what we could do together, from media and policymaker outreach to developing a legal strategy. I asked Save the Children’s board of trustees to create a subcommittee to meet with us every Friday to review our plans and cash position and to discuss new ideas and solutions. And our executive team made sure to overcommunicate with our people at headquarters and in the field, explaining exactly what we knew and what we didn’t and acknowledging that program closures and layoffs were likely. We initiated a weekly, all-hands update, and we were as transparent as possible in both delivering news and answering questions.
By early February, we realized we would lose a significant amount of U.S. government funding for a variety of programs, everything from emergency response in Sudan to education for girls in Afghanistan to food distribution in Mozambique. On February 7, we offered most employees the option to take a voluntary buyout, and about 40 did. The following week we moved into furloughing and termination, which was both painful and complicated since it affected more than 3,000 staff in about 50 different labor-law jurisdictions.
Everyone understood why we had to do it, but that didn’t make it any less tragic. All we could do was try to soften the blow by offering career and well-being resources and by assuring both departing and remaining staff that, in making those cuts, we were preserving programs to continue helping children and to maintain the organization’s long-term financial stability. By the beginning of May, we determined that roughly 70% of our U.S. government–funded awards had been terminated.
Planning a Rebound
Through the spring and summer of this year, we’ve been in our rebound phase: looking for new funding streams, continuing to build bipartisan relationships and advocate for policies that support children and families worldwide, activating communities that will support us in those efforts, investing in growth where we can, and keeping our remaining staff energized. For example, when we heard that funding for our U.S. programs—which serve more than 250 rural communities—might also be on the chopping block, we mobilized state governors and allies on Capitol Hill to preempt such cuts. We’ve also secured additional donations to reinstate some suspended or threatened global programs, such as education and protection work in Syrian refugee camps.
We’ve accelerated our outreach to corporations, foundations, major philanthropists, and smaller-scale donors, finding new ways to target those prospects, share our mission, and highlight the positive outcomes generated by our work. Our philanthropic partners stepped up tremendously, donating more than $16 million in undesignated funds through May, a 63% increase from the same period in 2024. Many of these donors—who had for years restricted their support to specific programs—redirected their contributions to our overall mission fund; understanding the gravity and significance of the moment, they trusted Save the Children to direct the money where it was needed most.
Internally, having seen our way through the cash crunch, we are also putting money toward mission-critical, future-focused upgrades to our outreach, content, and evidence-building systems. For example, globally we have committed a substantive investment to further digitize our programming, enhance our data infrastructure and analytics, and automate more systems to increase operational effectiveness despite the reduction in scale of our workforce.
Envisioning Reform
As we move into the end of 2025 and beyond, I’m keenly aware that crisis can often be a catalyst for necessary long-term change. There are many wonderful aspects to being a 106-year-old institution: our track record of positive impact, our collective knowledge, our deep understanding of nonprofit best practices and the regions in which we work. However, an organization of our age and size must also avoid complacency and be willing to adapt to a new normal of volatile or reduced government support.
We’ve already proved that we’re capable of transformation. When I joined from the corporate world a decade ago and first mentioned KPIs, or key performance indicators, it was considered a little countercultural. But now we have them, and they’re reported out every month. Did we keep more children in school? How many did we feed and vaccinate? What health improvements did we see? Are our budgets in line with expectations? Are the quality measures in green, amber, or red? We also measure the cost-effectiveness of our most prevalent interventions more clearly than ever before. And we’ve become smarter about deciding where we can add value with a rubric that helps us to choose whether, when, and how to intervene in a particular region or with a new emergency: What’s the available funding? How big is our footprint there? Which gaps can we best address?
Still, there is always room for improvement. As in any other industry, sector, or organization, there are inefficiencies to root out—and in the nonprofit world they are sometimes harder to see and correct, because we lack market signals. Our consumers are children in such desperate need that they happily accept anything we provide, and until recently our donors were consistently supportive.
Now we have more of an incentive to innovate. Don’t get me wrong: I hate that the United States suddenly ripped away aid that amounts to only 1% of its annual spending and yet saves countless lives and greatly enhances the country’s global and moral standing. But we can use the shock to become more efficient, collaborative, and experimental and to learn to drive the same positive impact with fewer resources.
We’re trying a number of approaches. One is to work more closely with various national, regional, and local governments to discern where international aid is the right intervention versus where officials’ commitments to the right policies and funding for children would be more effective. Another is to pursue more partnerships with fellow nonprofits so that we can each bring our own expertise and experience to a problem while also avoiding overlaps. We are examining when cash assistance would be more helpful than delivering food, medicine, or books, or when locally manufactured goods could be substituted for ones imported from afar. In emergencies, we are also testing fundraising not for the direct work of Save the Children or other Western NGOs but for a pooled fund to be given to and dispersed by local actors, with reporting requirements for accountability. We’ve tried this in South Sudan, giving small amounts of money to 160 domestic organizations, and found that it led to people getting the support they needed faster and at lower cost.
On a macro level, there is absolutely enough money and expertise in this world to make sure that children don’t suffer. Consider one simple intervention for a malnourished child, a six-week course of therapeutic peanut paste: It costs $67, is easy to administer, tastes great, and is an overwhelmingly effective treatment. We simply need to figure out how to most effectively raise money for and then deliver that kind of aid in a changed political landscape.
Lessons Learned
Stepping into the CEO role of Save the Children U.S. five years ago, I did not expect to confront Covid-19, wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, or the wrenching withdrawal of U.S. development assistance. But our organization has weathered many bad storms before, and we’ve always found ways to make good on our mission of ensuring that kids everywhere survive and thrive.
By sharing our experience, we hope to contribute to a collaborative conversation in which leaders learn from one another’s challenges, whether it’s a funding crisis, a new tariff, or the loss of a big client. We have navigated this difficult period by displaying and developing a few key organizational strengths.
First, radical acceptance: Confront your new and brutal reality as soon as possible. Second, flexibility: In any volatile environment, you must keep your knees slightly bent, ready to absorb and adapt to new developments. Third, focus: Ignore the noise around you, home in on what you can control, and commit to working together to fulfill your mission. Fourth, decisiveness: In chaotic and fast-moving situations, you can’t always wait for more information, so understand that close enough is good enough and that, if things change, you can adjust course. Finally, vision: My team’s embrace of the three-phase outlook—starting with crisis response but then looking ahead to rebound and reform—helped us immensely, giving us a positive, proactive mindset and pointing us to the light at the end of the tunnel.
Save the Children U.S. and other organizations funded by USAID, and above all children and vulnerable communities across the world, have suffered a devastating blow. But moving forward I am keeping in mind the great quote from Max Roser, the founder of Our World in Data: “The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.”
Yes, we have seen gradual rollbacks, and then a dramatic one, in official development aid, and we’ve seen unequal progress in health, nutrition, safety, and education across countries and demographic groups. At the same time, over the past 50 years we’ve seen enormous reductions in the number of children dying, getting sick, going hungry, or being deprived of education each year, while the percentage of people living in extreme poverty has dropped from 42% to below 10%.
We won’t let this crisis stop us from making even more headway on those problems in the decades to come, and we hope that governments, fellow nonprofits, foundations, businesses, and individuals will join us in that fight.
Originally published on Harvard Business Review