Airlink To The Rescue

Paloma, with your career background, you bring a wealth of expertise to Airlink.

So could you start please by sharing a few thoughts, um, on, you know, when you came to Airlink, you know, what, what were your first impressions and thoughts and priorities?

Um, well, first of all, Karen, thank you for having me, and thanks to your listeners, and hello to everybody listening to the podcast.

So when I first came to Airlink, I would step back and say when I heard about Airlink and discovered Airlink in the process of interviewing for this job, I was thrilled, and I was thrilled for a few reasons.

One is that Airlink embodies what I believe is a really effective model of development and humanitarian assistance, and that is a model that has successfully brought together the private sector, heavily in the form of aviation, but not exclusively, and the nonprofit and humanitarian sector to solve for major issues in the ecosystem of humanitarian assistance.

So that's the first thing, being an effective public/private, private humanitarian organization.

That's hard to do.

A lot of organizations try to do it.

The second thing is that Airlink is small, nimble, and incredibly efficient.

And what do I mean by that? Airlink's reason for being, and the reason it was really created, was to take advantage of underutilized capacity and airline assets, and to put those to good use, to put those to humanitarian causes.

That means that planes that we're taking to our, on our vacations and taking to work and for all, all these other great reasons are also many times mobilizing critical humanitarian aid that's needed and first responders, emergency responders.

So in that way, those are planes that were gonna fly anyway.

Those are routes that were gonna be taken that are now being used for humanitarian causes as well.

If Airlink wasn't providing this resource through commercial airlines, the humanitarian sector would be figuring out alternate ways to get that aid there in a much more expensive and much less efficient way.

I would say third, it, Airlink helps the humanitarian sector overcome a couple hurdles.

Cost, the biggest expense in mobilizing humanitarian aid is the cost of transportation and just figuring out that supply chain.

By providing free of cost or very low cost options to the humanitarian sector, we remove or at least diminish that obstacle.

The other is the logistical hurdles.

We're looking at disasters right now, the earthquake in Venezuela, the Ebola response, this response in Sudan.

Those are humanitarian crises, but they're also massive logistical, um, dilemmas.

And Airlink has figured out how to come up with creative, fast, effective, and cost-effective ways to help get the right aid to the right place at the right time.

So for me, Airlink answered a number of questions and needs that are in the humanitarian sector, and I just thought, "I have to get on board with this organization."

That's fantastic.

I know...

I, I mean, obviously, because I come from the sort of the airline side of this, uh, this world, albeit as a journalist, the...