"It's a familiar scene.  Following the onset of a major disease outbreak or natural disaster, government agencies, non-governmental organizations and the local community must join forces and act quickly to alleviate suffering. You, your colleagues and groups that don't normally work together now need to communicate, assemble teams, share information, make plans and coordinate a response.  Yet despite everyone's best intentions, a wealth of resources, deep expertise and tremendous effort, you still face challenges in trying to work together. The response once again proves confused, inefficient and far less effective than it should have been.   As a population waits for help, delays mount up, resources are wasted and too little arrives too late.  Will the cost, once again, be measured in human lives?"

Our Mission

InSTEDD's mission is to harness the power of technology to improve collaboration for global health and humanitarian action.  We are an innovation lab for tools designed to strengthen networks, build community resilience and improve early detection and response to major health-related events and natural or human-caused disasters. We grapple daily with the challenges of finding new approaches and new designs:  a simple, reliable way to bring it all together -- the people, the tools and the data -- and create the kinds of information flow that we know will save lives.  We think that with new, free and open-source technologies we can help humanitarian and public health organizations around the world work together more effectively in crises. We aim to reduce mortality, accelerate recovery and help prepare communities to face the unexpected with confidence in their own resilience.