Sixteen Years, 23 Million People, and a Partnership Blueprint Built in the Rubble of Haiti
In January 2010, a catastrophic earthquake killed more than 300,000 people in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. It was nearly impossible to get aid into the country. In that crisis a small nonprofit called Airlink tested a simple but radical idea: use excess capacity on commercial flights, seats and cargo space already flying empty or half-full, to move humanitarian supplies and emergency responders to places that needed them most. Working alongside United Airlines, that small team built an air bridge that delivered 500,000 pounds of aid and transported 2,000 doctors, nurses, and health workers into the disaster zone.
Fifteen years later, Paloma Adams-Allen, President and CEO of Airlink, and B.J. Youngerman, Managing Director of Community and Market Impact at United Airlines, took the EFG2026 stage together during a session highlighting their Silver HALO Award for Best Emergency/Disaster Response Initiative to reflect on what that partnership has become and what made it work. The answer, they argued, has less to do with goodwill and more to do with architecture.
United Treats Disaster Relief as a Core Business Function
United’s commitment to disaster relief didn’t begin with a strategy document. It began in Haiti. But what turned that moment of response into a sustained program was a deliberate decision to treat disaster relief not as a philanthropic add-on but as an area where the company has a genuine and distinctive operational role to play.
The logic is straightforward: United has planes positioned across the globe at every hour of every day. When a disaster happens, speed is everything — and moving quickly requires assets that are already in motion. “With disaster, you have to be able to respond very quickly,” Youngerman said. “Being able to use our assets and the fact that we can move people, as well as cargo, really quickly is something that we feel uniquely positioned to do.” That positioning is what makes the partnership with Airlink something more than a donation relationship. United isn’t writing a check and stepping back. It’s deploying infrastructure.’
“We have the best partnerships with companies and airlines who see investment in humanitarian causes as a core part of their business. Responding to humanitarian disasters means stability in communities, stability in markets, and a workforce that can come to work. It’s not just a nice thing to do.” — Paloma Adams-Allen, President & CEO, Airlink
The Pre-Planning Paradox: The Best Disaster Response Happens Before the Disaster
Airlink works with roughly 50 airline partners and 250 humanitarian organizations. When Airlink launched a research study last year to understand the drivers behind private sector aviation engagement with humanitarian aid, they found nearly 100% of surveyed airlines had donated capacity in the previous year, and more than 80 percent said they would want to support humanitarian causes or respond to disasters; However, fewer than a third had a framework in place to do it. The gap between willingness and readiness is where most disaster partnerships fail.
The United-Airlink relationship is built specifically to close it. Pre-committed resources mean Airlink knows exactly what capacity it has to work with before a crisis call comes in. Pre-aligned storytelling and stakeholder communications mean United can report impact internally without scrambling. And pre-structured governance means both organizations are already speaking the same language when speed matters most. “If you have a structure already in place to allow you to move more quickly, that’s really good,” Youngerman said. “It also allows us to tell that story internally to our stakeholders — and those of you who work at big companies know that’s a big part of what you have to do.”
View this post on Instagram
The Maui wildfires are the clearest recent example of that pre-planning paying off. United and Airlink moved quickly to deploy relief workers and supplies, but they also made a deliberate choice to think beyond the immediate response. Through a resilience fund and a series of convenings connecting nonprofits with community leaders, they built sustained support for the recovery process, one that continued long after the news cycle moved on. United also mobilized its customer base through Miles on a Mission, generating 55 million donated miles specifically for the Maui response.
“Pre-planning allows you to tell a different story…you’ve already aligned on what you’re working toward and how you’ll tell it.” — B.J. Youngerman, Managing Director of Community and Market Impact, United Airlines
23 Million People Later: What a 16-Year Partnership Produces
The cumulative reach of the United-Airlink partnership is 23 million people reached across disaster responses worldwide, including transporting 5,000 emergency responders and relief workers. Those numbers reflect 16 years of a partnership that has been stress-tested across earthquakes, wildfires, and humanitarian crises on multiple continents.
But Adams-Allen’s most pointed observation wasn’t about scale. It was about what produces scale: the quality of the corporate commitment underneath it. The partnerships that deliver the most, she said, are the ones where companies treat humanitarian investment as structurally important to their business. “It’s given us the stability, the predictability, and the closeness that we’ve needed to problem-solve together,” she said.
Stop Competing for the Same Pool, Start Building a Deeper One
Youngerman closed with a reframe that applies well beyond disaster relief. Nonprofits often approach corporate partnerships as a zero-sum competition — a finite pool of resources to be divided among organizations making the case for why their work deserves the dollars. The United-Airlink model suggests a different mental model.
“What we’ve found is that being able to bring partners together has a multiplying effect,” Youngerman said. “The question isn’t how to stand out from other nonprofits. It’s how your distinct capabilities fit into a broader ecosystem where the combined impact of A, B, C, and D together is greater than the sum of each working separately.” In the disaster space, that means airlines, humanitarian organizations, corporate funders, and community partners each contributing their unique skills within a structure designed to make the whole greater than its parts.
Adams-Allen’s version of the same point was even more direct: collaboration over competition. Always.
What began in the rubble of Port-au-Prince is now one of the most durable corporate-nonprofit disaster relief partnerships in the sector. The lesson isn’t about aviation or disaster response specifically. It’s about what becomes possible when a company stops treating social impact as a program and starts treating it as infrastructure.
You can continue to see United and Airlink’s partnership in action. During July, in response to the Venezuela earthquakes, United has launched a Miles on a Mission campaign to raise frequent flyer miles for responder flights, donating 2.5 million miles and matching customer donations up to an additional 2.5 million miles. Learn more at https://donate.mileageplus.com/venezuela-earthquake.
Ready to close the gap between willingness and readiness?
Our white paper, Before the Next Disaster: How Corporate and Nonprofit Partners Can Close the Gaps in Disaster Collaboration, comes out of the EFG2026 Collective Action Summit on Disaster Response. It brings together lessons from corporate and nonprofit leaders, including United Airlines, Airlink, CARE, PayPal, Amazon and the Center for Disaster Philanthropy. Inside, you’ll find a practical framework for setting up resources, governance and communications in advance, so your partnership is ready to move before the next disaster hits.