From our health to our environment, today's problems are all connected. At Panorama, we believe that we must connect to find solutions, so the creation of coalitions among philanthropists, government, and institutions is a key thread running through all our work.
Panorama hosts and supports Collaboratives, which unite a finite group of organizations around a single complex challenge, as well as an array of more flexible Networks, in which members have different perspectives on a big issue but are bound by a common vision. Our fluid, customized approach to these coalitions means a philanthropist could be a grantee of one project and an advisor or collaborator on another, potentially amplifying the impact of both.
Collaborative or Network, Panorama supports all its coalitions by creating opportunities and resources that extend the impact of the partners' joint efforts. We connect critical yet unexpected dots, fill big and small knowledge gaps, and offer programs and forums for partners to share insights and bring progress faster. Working together, coalition members drive stronger, more unified messages, confront challenges more effectively, and access large-scale funding and opportunities that would otherwise be out of reach.
Pandemic Action Network is a groundbreaking coalition born in-house at Panorama, co-founded by our CEO Gabrielle Fitzgerald who helped fight the 2014 Ebola outbreak and had been striving behind the scenes to avert and mitigate future crises. When COVID-19 struck in 2020, Gabrielle and her three co-founders immediately brought together a multi-sector network to advocate for bringing an end to this pandemic and ensuring the world is better prepared for the next one.
In its first two years, Pandemic Action Network has brought together more than 250 multi-sector partners globally — including advocates, communicators, strategists, campaigners, project managers, researchers, organizers, analysts, problem-solvers, business leaders, creatives, activists, and more — not only to end the COVID-19 crisis but also to prepare the world for future threats.
Working collaboratively, the Network’s members have mobilized essential resources to slow the spread of COVID-19, have produced critical policy papers, have developed urgent public health campaigns including #WorldMaskWeek (which engaged partners in 171 countries), have provided advisory support to key global bodies working on long-term pandemic preparedness, including the EU, the G7, and the G20, and have ensured that COVID response and pandemic preparedness remain on the top of political agendas.
Pandemics are too big, too numerous, and too complex for any one single stakeholder or sector to tackle alone. The power of Pandemic Action Network is its ability to harness the capacity and influence of a diverse and growing network of partners across sectors and geographies and turn it into impactful change, both to accelerate a global response to this pandemic and strengthen the global health security architecture to reduce the impact of pandemic threats in the future.
Early in the COVID pandemic, Panorama joined with four other organizations — Community Health Acceleration Partnership, Community Health Impact Coalition, Direct Relief, and VillageReach — to stand up the COVID-19 Action Fund for Africa (CAF-Africa), with a mission of delivering personal protective equipment (PPE) to community health workers in Africa.
CAF-Africa was built on a principle of radical collaboration and brought together 30 organizations who collectively achieved far more impact, more rapidly and effectively than individual organizations could have managed independently.
Together, CAF-Africa mobilized over $21 million in financial and in-kind contributions to distribute more than 121 million units of PPE to close to 500,000 community health workers in 18 African countries.
As this initiative wrapped up, CAF-Africa worked with the Pandemic Action Network to develop a policy brief, “Personal Protective Equipment for Frontline Health Workers: An Essential Component of Pandemic Preparedness & Response.” The brief outlined the progress that had been made in providing PPE to community health workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, but also detailed recommendations to how to ensure health workers had access to sufficient PPE in the future, including the need to scale up domestic production and create stockpiles.
