5 Reasons PIH Earns Your Support

Finding the best nonprofit to support requires some research. The organization’s mission should align with your personal values. It should tackle the complex issues you are passionate about. And it should have a proven record of impact.

So, how do you assess that?

Get to know them. Read what they write, listen to what they say, and—most importantly—watch what they do. Volunteer your time and attention to their work. Share what you have learned about them with others. And, when the time is right, support their work through donations.

At Partners In Health, we deeply value our supporters, especially those who attend our events, volunteer their time through grassroots advocacy, and donate to support the work we do all around the world.

Here are five reasons PIH has earned that support:

1. We Achieve Long-Term Impact

We measure our impacts over decades. PIH is not an emergency response organization, at least not in the traditional sense. Our global staff definitely respond to crises—both natural and manmade—but we do so while building stronger health systems for the long term.

We take this approach because those in need are our neighbors, friends, and family; 99% of PIH staff were born and raised in the country where they work.

We provide care and support for patients and their families. We learn from, mentor, train, and educate those working alongside us. We conduct research to discover best practices, then share those lessons learned with the larger world. And we use that evidence to influence national and global leaders, who can replicate and adapt our successful models of care in more countries around the world.

One key example of our unique model is our HIV work, which started in Haiti in the late 1990s and then spread around the world.

That is long-term, generational impact.

2. We Merge Social Justice with Medicine

PIH is a global health and social justice organization driven by a medical and moral mission to provide health care to those who need it most.

Our clinicians place patients at the center of all decision-making. Taking that perspective, we see that the right diagnosis and treatment plan is only part of a patient’s cure; we also need to address their social, emotional, and financial situation to effect lasting change.

When we look at this whole picture, we see the need to advocate for and with our patients, to fight injustice—in all its many forms—so that they will be able to enjoy their full right to health.

As our Co-founder Dr. Paul Farmer once said, and our supporters firmly believe: “The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that is wrong with the world.” 

3. We Accompany Our Partners

PIH’s work is built on optimism, action, and accompaniment—doing whatever it takes, for as long as it takes, to ensure our patients’ right to health.

We accompany first and foremost our patients, whom we often refer to as “our bosses,” but we also accompany colleagues in ministries of health, public officials, partners, and our supporters as we learn from and with each other.

Only by keeping an open commitment to collaboration, we can aspire to solve problems caused by centuries of oppression and to find the hope needed to overcome seemingly insurmountable challenges.

Our community health workers embody accompaniment in every country where we work. They are recruited from their communities, trained and mentored, and serve as the living link between their neighbors, friends, and family and local health facilities. Their regular home visits forge a connection with patients and help guarantee successful outcomes.

4. We Disrupt the Status Quo

In the late 1990s, PIH leaders delivered a message that no one in the global health establishment wanted to hear: thousands of miles away, in Peru, people were dying of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis—a deadly infectious disease—and world leaders had turned their backs. With the right medication regimens and steady support from community health workers, our clinicians proved that patients could be cured at higher rates than previously thought possible.

It wasn’t the first time PIH had challenged the status quo. And it wouldn’t be the last.

Since 1987, PIH has been caring for some of the world’s most impoverished patients and speaking truth to power, because we firmly believe a better, more just world is possible. 

Our defiant optimism has changed global health policy and strengthened the movement for health equity worldwide.

5. Your Money Goes to Patients and Programs

We can proudly say 92% of the money PIH raises each year is funneled directly to support our global programs. Recognizing this effective use of funds, Charity Navigator awarded us its top four-star ranking as one of the nonprofits to which supporters can “give with confidence.”

Read our annual report to see what we accomplished, thanks to our supporters, last year.