The humanitarian system is at a crossroads. As needs rise and resources shrink, business-as-usual approaches are no longer enough.
The Impact Alliance brings together three of the world’s leading international humanitarian organizations — CARE, Mercy Corps, and Save The Children — to work in a more connected, efficient, and locally led way. By combining complementary strengths, the Alliance aims to reach more people, more effectively, and with greater impact.
What is the Impact Alliance?
The Impact Alliance is a new model for collaboration between CARE, Mercy Corps, and Save The Children, three independent organizations working together in new ways to improve how humanitarian aid is delivered.
The Alliance began when three CEOs — Michelle Nunn, Tjada D’Oyen McKenna, and Janti Soeripto — came together around a shared belief: that deeper collaboration can help the sector deliver greater impact, accelerate innovation, and better support locally led solutions at scale.
Together, these three organizations have a powerful collective reach: $3.5 billion in funding, 36,000 staff, 4,000 partners, and programs in 110 countries reaching 200 million people.
Each organization remains distinct, with its own mission, leadership, programs, and operational footprint. Through the Alliance, we are working together where collaboration creates value — aligning efforts, sharing select systems and services, and scaling solutions more effectively.
This includes:
- Coordinating investments and innovation efforts
- Sharing infrastructure and operational capabilities where it improves efficiency
- Expanding joint approaches to locally led solutions
- Accelerating learning and scaling what works
The goal is to achieve greater impact together than any one organization can alone — while maintaining the distinct strengths of each partner.
Why this approach is needed now?
The humanitarian system is under increasing strain.
Global needs are rising, driven by conflict, climate change, and economic instability — while funding is becoming more constrained. At the same time, the way aid is delivered has not kept pace with the scale and complexity of today’s challenges. Addressing this gap requires new ways of working.
The Impact Alliance reflects a shared belief that deeper collaboration can help organizations operate more efficiently, adapt more quickly, and better support solutions led by the communities most affected.
By working together, we aim to reduce duplication, scale what works, and direct more resources to where they are needed most.
This is an evolving effort, and an important step toward building a more connected, effective, and locally led humanitarian system.
How we’re working together
The Impact Alliance is focused on a set of initial areas where collaboration can improve how aid is delivered and create a foundation for sustainable change. Importantly, we strive to achieve a bigger impact for the communities that we serve together, than we could do alone.
Current areas of focus include:
- Collaborative procurement: Pooling purchasing power to reduce costs, improve supplier quality, and build more sustainable procurement systems across the humanitarian and development sector. We are also exploring AI-driven analytics to identify savings opportunities, track return on investment, and strengthen supplier performance management.
- Scaling proven interventions: Partnering with governments and local actors to embed and scale evidence-based solutions within national systems. Through this work, we aim to expand access to proven interventions and accelerate sustainable impact for millions of people.
- Community insights: Transforming how we gather and use real-time input from the people we serve to shape programs and improve outcomes. We are shifting from extractive feedback models to continuous, two-way engagement at scale—enabling communities to generate, use, and act on their own insights and priorities.
- Innovation and AI: Expanding the use of tools such as AI and digital platforms across all workstreams to improve program delivery, increase efficiency, and enhance access to information for communities. Applying emerging technologies across all Alliance workstreams to improve decision-making, increase efficiency, and expand access to information. Some current applications include community asset mapping, real-time insight synthesis and dashboarding, early warning systems, and data-driven analysis that strengthens program delivery and impact.
These efforts are in the early stages and will continue to evolve as the Alliance learns, grows, and identifies new opportunities to create greater impact together.
Learn more and connect
In a joint op-ed in Devex, the CEOs of CARE, Mercy Corps, and Save the Children share the thinking behind the Impact Alliance and the opportunity to rethink how global aid is delivered:
We are uniting to change the future of aid — and hope funders will follow
Opinion: As heads of three of the world’s largest humanitarian organizations, here is how we aim to work together as an alliance to provide more cost-effective, relevant aid solutions.
The world has changed, and so must we.
As leaders of three of the world’s largest humanitarian aid and development organizations, we simply cannot continue to address today’s interconnected challenges separately.
Humanitarian organizations are built to respond to crises — wars, earthquakes, floods, famine, and displacement. But today, the humanitarian system is confronting a crisis of another kind: A sharp contraction in global emergency aid at the very moment needs are surging. In 2025, emergency aid from five of the world’s largest donors to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs dropped by nearly 54%, according to an internal analysis of the agency’s data, even as their economies grew by $2.2 trillion in the same year.