Direct Relief Honored by Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors with Resolution for Receiving Innovation Award

Thomas Tighe, CEO of Direct Relief, will accept the resolution in person on behalf of Direct Relief.

Santa Barbara-based Direct Relief is California’s largest international nonprofit organization, active in 70 countries and the only nonprofit licensed to distribute pharmaceuticals in all 50 states. It works with more than 1,000 health clinics across the U.S. to assist in emergencies and an ongoing basis, providing them with free medications for people in need. The organization has been among the world’s largest medical suppliers in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake, has top charity ratings, including four-star and “top-notch” ratings from Charity Navigator, and a 100% fundraising efficiency rating from Forbes magazine. For more information, please visit www.DirectRelief.org.

Direct Relief was chosen for the Drucker Nonprofit Innovation Award for its ability to adapt the insight, approaches, and tools of commercial technology for humanitarian purposes. During this difficult economic period of shrinking budgets, growing humanitarian needs, and increasing frequency and severity of large-scale disasters, Direct Relief reinvented its technological approaches and processes, expanded its programs and activities, deployed an extensive enterprise system to manage global inventory in the highly regulated area of pharmaceutical medications, and created a cloud-based information platform to network thousands of nonprofit health facilities. More information about the Peter F. Drucker Award for Nonprofit Innovation is described here.