Support people in need all over the world by ensuring emergency funding is available to provide the necessities of food and accommodation in a time of crisis.

Almost every day we hear or read the news that somewhere in the world there is another major crisis. People are in danger. People are fleeing their homes. People and homes have been destroyed. Children’s schooling has been disrupted – for how long?

Or – what is more likely – we don’t hear about it. Crises are happening in so many parts of the world that many news outlets have stopped reporting on most of them all together. Crisis, displacement, violence, children born in refugee camps – these have become the new normal.

And yet, in all countries where different kinds of crisis are occurring, there are people in those countries, or in nearby countries, offering their help to those in need. Sometimes this help might simply be to share what little food they have with a family of strangers who have fled the violent destruction of their village. Or they might make their church or their church hall available to several such families. Or the church might mobilise the doctors and nurses among their congregations to provide free emergency medical care to those in most need during a crisis.

As Anglicans and as Christians, we are always humbled to learn what our partner churches and their communities around the world are doing in response to the many humanitarian disasters the world faces each day. In DR Congo, for example, we heard that ordinary Anglican families were taking in families who had suddenly arrived in their village, fleeing violence in their own village. The church knew their members couldn’t do this on their own for very long, and so they put out a call to the wider church for support. In this case, AID was able to send around $20,000 to the church there, through one of our African partners, the Council for Anglican Provinces of Africa (CAPA).

AID can send these funds in a very timely manner because of our Rapid Emergency Response Fund. This fund is normally made up of money which might have been raised in excess of the needs of a particular partner for whom we have launched an emergency appeal. Over any 12 month-period we might have four or five calls on such funds, and each time, once we have assessed the situation, we have usually been able to send $5-10,000 to show the solidarity of Australian Anglicans with the ordinary (and often extraordinary) kindness of local churches as they “stand in solidarity with the poor and needy” (as our third Mark of Mission states).

Now that we have opened this fund for direct donations, we hope you will wish to be part of this small, practical and much appreciated support we can show for the work of partner churches as they reach out to their local communities in crisis.