When disaster calls, Naba Gurung answers

As the Humanitarian Response Coordinator for PWRDF, he helped lead responses to four hurricanes in the Caribbean, a drought and famine appeal in East Africa, a wildfire in British Columbia, flooding in Nepal and a mudslide in Peru. That was just 2017.

Yet Gurung says his job takes him to places and to people he never in his “wildest dreams thought of going and meeting.”

What he really loves is being a part of effecting change. In his native Nepal he had been involved in community-based international development work, then later did his Masters in International Environment and Development Studies in Norway. He arrived in Canada as a skilled immigrant intending to pursue a PhD at Western University but took an eight-month contract with PWRDF instead. Sixteen years later, he’s still here.

Because PWRDF is not an implementing agency, “we don’t do the projects ourselves,” says Gurung. “We have the office in Toronto, but our development projects happen all over the world, in countries where we have long-standing relationships, including programs in Canada itself.”

PWRDF relief projects, he says, are primarily implemented by members of the ACT Alliance, a coalition of more than 140 churches and church-related organizations that work together in more than 100 countries to create sustainable change in the lives of the poor and marginalized. “The main advantage of ACT is they are deeply rooted in the communities they serve,” says Gurung. He and other PWRDF staff are involved in setting up strategies, policies, guidelines and procedures of the Alliance.

The system is effective because of the simple chain of communication – organizations on the ground, who know the context and the specific community they’re engaged in, send an alert to the regional office about who is doing what, who’s most vulnerable, most impacted. That information is then circulated to the rest of the members, including PWRDF.

Gurung works closely with the regional offices, reviewing appeals and advising where necessary. For example, ACT recently took his advice and included the emergency response work of Al Ahli Hospital in Gaza into the appeal that is responding to the treatment and care of those affected by the Gaza conflict.