Why responsible exit planning should begin long before a disaster fund closes
By Şenay Ataselim-Yılmaz, PhD
This week, I joined a table discussion at the Clinton Global Initiative titled “Disaster Response and Beyond: How Humanitarian Actors Can Drive Long-term Recovery and Resilience.” Led by GlobalGiving, and moderated by Taylor Dudley from Center for Disaster Philanthropy, the conversation focused on a challenge that has become increasingly important across humanitarian and philanthropic work: how to bridge the gap between immediate disaster response and the much longer process of recovery.
We discussed what it means to plan for recovery early, to recognize local community organizations as responders in their own right, and to create greater continuity between emergency funding and the longer-term investments communities need to recover, adapt, and become more resilient.
The conversation felt especially timely for me because these are questions we have been wrestling with at Turkish Philanthropy Funds for the last few years.
Since the February 2023 earthquakes in Türkiye, our Earthquake Fund has moved through several distinct stages from immediate relief to recovery, from recovery to resilience, and now toward sustainability. Throughout that journey, we have repeatedly asked ourselves not only what communities need next, but also what our own role should become as those needs evolve. And, increasingly, one question has come to the center:
When a disaster strikes, philanthropy knows how to move quickly. Money is raised. Emergency grants are made. Food, shelter, health care, education, and psychosocial support become immediate priorities. Donors want to help, nonprofits mobilize, and funders build new partnerships at extraordinary speed. But the harder work begins when the emergency phase ends: public attention moves on, giving declines, and emergency funds begin to close while communities remain in the long process of recovery.
If disaster philanthropy is meant to contribute not only to survival but to long-term recovery and resilience, then responsible exit cannot be something we think about only when the money is nearly gone. At TPF, this is not a question we have started asking only now, as we approach the conclusion of our Earthquake Fund. Since 2023, we have repeatedly asked how long earthquake-specific philanthropy should continue, how the needs of affected communities were changing, what role TPF should play at each stage of recovery, and what would need to be in place before we could responsibly step away. Throughout this process, our understanding of what should come next has been shaped by the organizations working in affected communities, their staff, and the people they serve.
For us, locally led recovery does not mean stepping away from strategy or from the responsibility that comes with stewarding philanthropic resources. It means building that strategy with a much deeper understanding of what local organizations are seeing, what communities are experiencing, and how needs are changing over time. TPF still has a responsibility to assess results, financial accountability, organizational capacity, sustainability, and the overall use of limited resources. But those decisions should be grounded in ongoing dialogue with the organizations closest to the work and informed by the priorities and realities they bring forward. In that sense, our role is not to determine the future of local organizations, but to use philanthropy strategically in ways that strengthen their ability to shape that future themselves.
More than three years after the earthquakes, TPF’s Earthquake Fund has mobilized more than $20 million from more than 100,000 donors around the world and supported a broad network of civil society organizations working across earthquake-affected communities. Over that period, our grantmaking evolved significantly from immediate humanitarian relief to education, mental health, livelihoods, women’s economic participation, youth development, disability inclusion, social cohesion, environmental recovery, and the strengthening of local civil society. We supported organizations responding to urgent needs, but we also invested in locally rooted actors, partnerships, and community capacity that could play a role long after the emergency itself had passed.
That evolution required us to continually reassess what recovery meant. At different stages, the right intervention looked very different: first meeting urgent needs, then helping communities regain stability, then strengthening resilience, and increasingly asking what institutions, services, relationships, and local capacities need to remain in place for the long term. The Earthquake Fund therefore became more than a sequence of grants; it became an evolving recovery strategy shaped by changing conditions on the ground and by what we were learning from our partners.
From relatively early in that evolution, we also knew that a fund created in response to an extraordinary disaster could not, and should not, become permanent. The question was never simply when to stop funding. It was how to build toward an exit responsibly, while protecting the strongest organizations, capacities, and approaches that had emerged through the recovery.
Exit Planning Should Begin Long Before the Exit
In disaster philanthropy, exit is sometimes treated as the final administrative stage of a fund: the budget runs down, final grants are made, reports are collected, and the fund closes. We believe that thinking about exit only at that point is too late. Exit planning should influence decisions much earlier, including which organizations are funded, whether local capacity is being strengthened, whether organizations are becoming dependent on emergency resources, whether programs are responding to current rather than historical needs, and whether funders are helping build institutions that can survive after extraordinary philanthropic attention subsides.
Disaster Response Has a Life Cycle
The first months after the earthquakes demanded speed. TPF supported organizations responding to immediate humanitarian needs and helping communities navigate extraordinary disruption. But the needs did not remain static. As emergency response moved into recovery, our grantmaking evolved toward education, mental health, livelihoods, women’s economic participation, youth, disability inclusion, social cohesion, environmental recovery, and longer-term community resilience.
Emergency Response → Recovery → Resilience → Sustainability
This progression reinforced something that now shapes our broader approach to disaster philanthropy: a disaster fund should not be viewed simply as a pool of money distributed through a succession of grants. It has a life cycle, and each stage requires different forms of capital and asks different questions. At first, the question is what people need right now; later, it becomes what will enable communities to recover, what capacities will make them more resilient, and eventually what needs to be sustainable without us. A funder that continues answering the first question long after the context has changed risks extending an emergency model beyond its usefulness. We believe responsible philanthropy has to move with the community.
The Danger of Staying Too Long, and Leaving Too Quickly
There are risks on both sides of philanthropic exit. Leaving too quickly can destabilize organizations that have become essential parts of local recovery. Disaster-response organizations may have hired teams, built community trust, developed specialized expertise, established local partnerships, and assumed responsibilities that did not exist before the crisis. Abrupt withdrawal can put all of that at risk.
Staying indefinitely carries its own risks. Emergency philanthropy can unintentionally become part of an organization's permanent financial model. Activities can continue because funding remains available rather than because they still represent the highest priority. Organizations may delay building diversified revenue because disaster-specific support continues. Responsible exit, therefore, requires navigating between two undesirable outcomes: Our goal has been neither to withdraw suddenly nor to sustain every organization and program indefinitely, but to help organizations and investments that have demonstrated meaningful value to their communities and have a credible path forward beyond earthquake-specific philanthropy.
From Funding Projects to Asking What Should Remain
One of the most significant shifts in our thinking has been moving from asking “What should we fund next?” to asking “What should remain after we leave?” Those questions sound similar, but they lead to very different grantmaking decisions. A successful program may still not warrant another grant; an organization may have performed extremely well but need a different kind of support; and a smaller investment in organizational capacity might ultimately create more lasting value than another year of program delivery.
A project might also need to end while the knowledge, network, trained staff, or community capacity developed through it should remain. Once the exit becomes the lens, the objective changes. The goal is no longer continuation for its own sake, but helping ensure that the value communities and local organizations have built can endure.
Our Exit Strategy Has Two Phases
After years of observing how the recovery evolved and discussing what a responsible transition should look like, TPF is structuring the final stage of the Earthquake Fund around two complementary approaches. The first focuses on helping locally rooted organizations strengthen their ability to remain effective and sustainable; the second focuses on successful investments whose impact may benefit from one final strategic grant.
Phase One: Institutional Sustainability
Some organizations that became important parts of the recovery ecosystem are deeply rooted in earthquake-affected communities. They have built trust, knowledge, relationships, staff capacity, and physical presence that would be difficult to recreate. Yet many operate in an increasingly difficult funding environment as international and domestic attention shifts elsewhere. For a selected group of these organizations, TPF will provide flexible institutional support for up to two years.
We have been very deliberate about what this funding represents. It is not simply two more years of operating support. It is intended to serve as a bridge to sustainability. Organizations will be expected to use this period to strengthen areas such as strategic planning, governance, fundraising, revenue diversification, financial systems, partnerships, organizational infrastructure, and leadership, while articulating how they intend to operate in a world where TPF's Earthquake Fund no longer exists.
If this organization is important to the long-term well-being of its community, what must become stronger now so that it can remain there without depending on earthquake-specific philanthropy?
That distinction matters because philanthropy often invests heavily in programs and not enough in the institutions responsible for delivering them. Long-term recovery ultimately depends upon capable local organizations, not permanently funded emergency projects.
Phase Two: Strategic Final Investments
Our second phase asks a different question. Across several years of grantmaking, some projects, partnerships, services, and models have demonstrated meaningful results, and in some cases, one additional investment may allow those results to become more durable. TPF will therefore consider a limited number of strategic follow-up grants to current and recent partners, but these will not be conventional renewals, and strong past performance will not, by itself, qualify an organization for another grant.
Instead, we will ask why TPF should make one more investment in the work before we leave, and what will remain because we did. A strong proposal might institutionalize a successful model, help transition a service to local ownership, strengthen a network that no longer needs TPF at its center, leverage another funder or partner, or preserve knowledge, infrastructure, skills, or local capacity developed through previous investments. The important distinction is between funding continuation and funding transition. Those are not the same thing.
The Exit Criteria Matter
We also want our decisions to be disciplined. Relationships become deep during disaster response. Funders and grantees work through difficult circumstances together, sometimes for years. And that trust matters enormously. But relationships alone cannot determine final investments. We are reviewing opportunities through several lenses: whether the previous investment demonstrated strong results, whether the need remains relevant today, why additional funding is required, what will be different because another grant is made, what lasting value will remain, whether there is a credible pathway beyond TPF funding, and whether the organization has demonstrated strong financial stewardship and reporting.
We are also asking whether each investment makes sense not only on its own, but as part of the final Earthquake Fund portfolio. That question becomes increasingly important as a disaster fund matures. At the beginning, the unit of analysis is often the immediate need; near the end, it should increasingly become the ecosystem.
Look at the Ecosystem, Not Only the Grants
After years of grantmaking, funders have an unusual vantage point because they can see across organizations, geographies, issues, and approaches. That creates a responsibility to step back and ask which organizations are recognized by their communities and partners as important local anchors, where local capacity has grown, where critical gaps remain, which services are duplicated, where local organizations and communities are already taking greater ownership, and what support may help that transition.
These questions sometimes produce uncomfortable answers. Not every successful project will require continued philanthropic support, and in some cases the right outcome may be a transition, adaptation, or responsible conclusion shaped with local partners. That is precisely why exit needs a strategy.
One of the most important lessons we have learned is that sustainability does not mean permanence. Philanthropy sometimes treats the continuation of a program as evidence of success. But some interventions exist because an emergency created an extraordinary need. If that need changes, continuing the intervention indefinitely may not be the right objective.
A program can end successfully. A temporary service can accomplish its purpose. What matters is whether the value created through the investment remains. Perhaps people were trained. A community network was established. An organization became stronger. A methodology was documented. A partnership was institutionalized. Local leadership developed. Knowledge remained in the community. The activity may conclude while the impact continues. That is a very different understanding of sustainability, and one particularly important in disaster philanthropy.
Measure What Remains
The philanthropic sector is understandably interested in what happens while a disaster fund is active: how much money was raised, how quickly it was deployed, how many grants were made, and how many people were reached. Those are important measures. But as we move toward the final years of TPF’s Earthquake Fund, we have become increasingly interested in another set of questions: what will remain five years from now, which organizations and partnerships will still be serving their communities, which capabilities will have become institutionalized, whether organizations will have diversified their funding, and whether communities will be better equipped to navigate the next crisis.
Those outcomes are much harder to capture in a grant report, but they may ultimately tell us more about whether disaster philanthropy succeeded.
Exit Is Part of the Response
Perhaps the most important lesson from our experience is that an exit strategy should not be thought of as something separate from disaster response. Thinking about how you leave changes how you enter. It encourages funders to invest earlier in local institutions, creates greater discipline around temporary programs, forces conversations about financial dependency, and puts sustainability on the table before the final grant.
TPF did not arrive at its Earthquake Fund exit strategy overnight. It has emerged from years of grantmaking, observation, conversation, adjustment, and sometimes difficult questions about our own role. The discussion at CGI this week reinforced something our own experience has been teaching us for several years: the transition from humanitarian response to long-term recovery requires deliberate planning and sustained attention.
If we want communities to emerge from disasters stronger and more resilient, funders must think beyond the immediate response, not only about what comes next for communities, but also about what comes next when philanthropic funding itself begins to recede. That requires planning for local ownership, institutional strength, financial sustainability, and the eventual transition away from disaster-specific funding. In that sense, exit is not separate from disaster response; it is part of responsible disaster response.
The February 2023 earthquakes required TPF to move quickly. Leaving requires something different: the responsibility to support a thoughtful transition as communities move from recovery toward longer-term resilience. The success of a disaster fund should not ultimately be measured only by what happened while the funder was present, but also by what remained strong enough to continue after the funder was gone.