Boilerplate

About ShelterBox (Boilerplate)

ShelterBox is a global disaster relief charity with affiliate offices across Europe, Africa, North America and Asia focused on emergency shelter. ShelterBox USA is headquartered in Santa Barbara, CA. Since its founding in 2000, ShelterBox has helped more than 2 million people worldwide rebuild their lives by providing them with emergency shelter and essential household supplies.

There are now 113 million people around the world forced from their homes due to disasters, conflict, or the consequences of climate change. ShelterBox is a world authority on providing innovative, rapid, and practical shelter to families in some of the world’s hardest-to-reach places and most devastated disaster zones.

ShelterBox strives to source equipment and delivery methods that will place shelter quickly into the hands of the vulnerable when they need it most. From family-sized tents designed to withstand the elements, ShelterKits containing all the essential tools needed to start repairing and rebuilding homes, solar lighting, and water filtration. The charity’s signature green boxes – durable and highly portable – are now a familiar and welcome sight in humanitarian emergencies worldwide.

ShelterBox sees shelter as a process, working with local communities and partner agencies to build stronger, resilient and sustainable shelter that can be delivered quickly, but also consolidated over the longer term as a community recovers. It pre-positions aid in locations across the globe, so it is never far from where it may be needed.

It has provided help and hope following some of the world’s most devastating disasters: Haiti’s earthquake in 2010; Japan’s Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in 2011; the floods that wreaked havoc in Malawi and Malaysia in 2015; Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines in 2013; the two massive earthquakes that shook Nepal in 2015; Hurricane Harvey that devastated the Southern US in 2017; 2019 Cyclone Idai in Malawi; and Haiti’s most recent 7.2 Magnitude earthquake in 2021.

It has also been there to help rebuild lives during conflict. It has brought shelter to the displaced in Syria and its neighboring countries since 2012, provided refuge for families fleeing terror in the Lake Chad Basin of Africa, and is now working to support families displaced by the violence in Yemen.

ShelterBox is funded only by private charitable support – it receives no government funding – and has a team of inspirational trained volunteers who take time out of their busy lives to assess and deploy aid around the world. It is also the only official Project Partner of Rotary International, whose 1.2 million members raise funds for ShelterBox and often provide local support on the ground during a disaster.