Distribute Aid (DA) offers supply-chain management services for grassroots organisations, ensuring humanitarian aid gets to where it’s needed most, principally focusing on the Refugee Aid movement in Europe. Originally many small NGO’s were organising deliveries of aid to various locations across Europe. We saw this ourselves in the early days of MRA when we helped sort and pack aid for Calais, Greece, Lebanon and Syria. Distribute Aid grew out of the need to improve and rationalise the process and to increase efficiencies of scale. They are logistics experts with partnerships that allow them to operate efficiently, saving aid groups valuable time and money. Many of our supporters will know Dom Ford from Marlow who, in 2020-21 was managing shipments for DA in Belgrade and improving their processes such as helping aid delivery into Europe to navigate the complexities of Brexit.

As the organisation has grown and developed they have seen the opportunity presented by large ‘in-kind’ donations (when a company decides to give a large amount of stock for free. This could be anything from blankets, to soap, to underwear). In 2021 MRA provided them with a grant of £3000 to enable their expansion to manage these corporate donations and procured aid. Being able to carry out this expansion brought huge benefits to the aid groups and ultimately to the people in need that we all want to help. In-kind donations add huge psychological value and dignity as they help bring brand new items to people, on top of the second-hand donations that are the foundations of this movement.

This is a different type of project for us to support, but it is a donation that has multiple and ongoing benefits, that will ultimately help refugees and asylum seekers over and over again.

Distribute Aid continue to use these funds to support donations of clothing and other equipment.

You can watch this excellent summary video to find out more about Distribute Aid and how their work helps refugees.