Thank you to our HIF Funding Committee

In 2017/18, our innovation programme (the Humanitarian Innovation Fund (the HIF)) underwent an external evaluation and strategy development to inform it’s future direction, reflecting on what was working well and what could be improved. We made some changes that would help us to address bigger and more complex problems, starting with what, and how, we fund.We ended our ‘core grants’ style of funding and redirected our grant funding and support to our existing and new focus areas in Water, Sanitation and Hygiene; Gender-based Violence; Disability and Older Age Inclusion; Scaling, and Localisation.We couldn’t have done any of this without the support of our governance groups who help to steer us strategically in all we do through the HIF, like our Funding Committee, Advisory Group and Technical Working Groups. Since we embarked on our new funding direction, we’ve worked closely with these groups to seek feedback on how our funding processes and decision making was working for all involved.After a period of review, we realised we needed to make the role of our Funding Committee clearer and more aligned with our targeted and thematic funding opportunities. After working closely with Funding Committee members, we have agreed that the best way to do this is to bring the current Committee to an end, and build a new one – one that responds to our updated Terms of Reference, is selected through an open recruitment process, has the varied areas of expertise we need, and is gender balanced.We are incredibly grateful to our current Committee for the support they have given us over many years, the time they have dedicated, and the invaluable expertise they have shared, which has enabled us to fund over 160 promising solutions.We could not have done it without them, and would like to say a heartfelt thank you to:

• (Chair) David Sanderson, Professor and Inaugural Judith Neilson Chair in Architecture, University of New South Wales
• Andrew Collins, Professor in Disaster and Development, Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences, Northumbria University
• Shaun Hazeldine, Head - Innovation and Futures, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies
• Laura Walker McDonald, Senior Director, Insights & Impact, Digital Impact Alliance (DIAL) at the United Nations Foundation
• Sanjana Hattotuwa, Special Advisor, ICT4Peace Foundation
• Iain Stewart, Independent Security, Risk and Resilience Advisor
• Romola Sanyal, Associate Professor of Urban Geography, Department of Geography and Environment, London School of Economics and Political Science