Our Mission and Values

Founded in 2019, Distribute Aid has grown into Europe's largest grassroots logistics organisation. We improve how aid is sourced, delivered, and distributed so as to achieve a greater collective impact in serving the needs of displaced and otherwise disadvantaged people. We have coordinated over 80 shipments of humanitarian aid and worked with 140+ small charities and organisations in 12 countries across Europe, Lebanon, and the United States of America.

Our mission is to provide for basic human needs at scale by connecting communities and empowering people to uphold human dignity.

Our approach is to build open-access physical and digital infrastructure that any humanitarian aid organisation can use, with an emphasis on supporting local grassroots organisations access large-scale infrastructure to carry out their mission. We run our own open-offer 4th party logistics services to support everyone in our extensive grassroots network, which includes needs assessments and aid matching services. We are a highly collaborative and transparent organisation that helps our partners grow their own efforts by sharing information, resources, and decision-making.

Our impact has led to a 2.5x efficiency gain across our supply chain by increasing coordination, reducing costs, saving volunteer time, and preventing waste. Every $1 we spend on administration, projects, and logistics delivers $88 worth of aid to frontline organisations.

We are a non-profit, non-political Swedish-registered charity with registration number #802521-4456.

Transparency: We believe in openly sharing our knowledge, experience, and techniques. Our commitment to open-source information and technology is steadfast because meeting the basic human needs of our network’s end beneficiaries is what is most important.

Collaboration: Collaboration is inherent in our mission statement. We scale our network through collaboration, not control. We recognise that diversity makes us stronger and strive for inclusion as we welcome new people to become stakeholders on our team and in our network.

Proactivity: We plan ahead so that we are prepared for global crises, supply chain disruptions, and unexpected events. We practice proactivity in a way that does not undermine our pull-not-push mentality.

Pull-not-push Mentality: Our work begins with an understanding of needs. We only organise aid shipments when we know the aid is needed, and we trust those most proximate to beneficiaries–frontline groups–to understand their needs. If aid is not needed anywhere, we do not push to ship it.

Results-Driven Approach - Our focus is on achieving our mission and strategy. We adapt our services and our approach to meet the needs of the moment in order to create the best results for the end beneficiary.

Sustainability: We pursue ecological, financial, and workload sustainability. We believe that ecological sustainability is a holistic and ongoing effort; we avoid greenwashing and other mindsets which reduce sustainability to an afterthought.

Impartiality and Unconditionality: We take active steps to ensure that aid that is delivered using our services is distributed freely, fairly, and unconditionally by frontline groups.

Professionalism: When we say we will do something, we do it, and we establish processes to prevent overpromises. We assume positive intent when communicating with other people and organisations. We empower our team members to maintain strong boundaries and be accountable to each other.