Fund Purpose

This Section describes how the GDIN Fund operates, including the scope of its objectives and organizational features.

(1) Overview

The GDIN Fund is a charitable endowment for humanitarian purposes. The fundamental concept is to raise financial support from private sector entities, with possible contribution from public sources, for the purposes outlined in the Mission paragraph immediately below.

The GDIN Fund is an integral part of GDIN corporation and thus is operated under US Federal Tax law. 

(2) Mission

The GDIN Fund seeks to reduce disaster costs through the maintenance of certain core functions of the GDIN, and the sponsorship of GDIN projects that focus on the value of new and emerging technologies to the international disaster community.

The purpose of the GDIN Fund is to support the GDIN corporation generally, and to identify, assess, and disseminate knowledge about new and emerging technologies of vital importance to disaster mitigation, preparation, response, and recovery, and to allow the international community to systematically and rapidly take advantage of loss reducing and life saving tools.

(3) GDIN Projects Supported by the GDIN Fund

The GDIN Fund is geared toward sponsoring activity-based projects with reportable results. The role of technology to disaster management is so pervasive that there are numerous ways in which information about technology can assist disaster managers, as well as numerous ways technology developers, service providers, and users can beneficially interact. The GDIN Fund's project focus is on technology testing and evaluation through applied projects.

The GDIN Fund's Project Program will initially support two areas of activities. Additional activities may be introduced in the future.

(a) Technology Demonstrations

The conduct of formal exercises to demonstrate the capabilities of new technologies in the context of real or simulated events. The purpose of technology demonstrations is to measure the value of a particular technology to some aspect of disaster management, and to report the findings to the international disaster management community.

(b) Technology Roadmap of Requirements vs. Capabilities

Identify those technology advances that are most responsive to pressing disaster management needs. A disaster management technology roadmap will be developed and regularly updated that will prioritize user requirements and match them against existing and emerging technology solutions.

The roadmap will serve three purposes. First, it will reveal and prioritize inadequacies in disaster management practices which could be addressed by technology solutions. (Various roadmaps will have to be developed to address the conditions in specific regions of the world). Second, it will inform technology developers where there are user requirements for which new products and services are most keenly needed. Third, it will instruct the GDIN Fund as to its own "investment strategy" in future projects.