This past summer, the Guadalupe River in Texas’s Hill Country region rose about 26 feet in less than an hour, after heavy thunderstorms over the Fourth of July weekend. At least 135 people, including 37 children, perished in what has become the deadliest inland flood event in the United States since 1976. Many of the deaths included young girls whose summer camp cabins were located in designated flood zones along the Guadalupe.
Volunteers rushed to the area to help, including those from Mexican nonprofits. Fundación 911, a nonprofit that supports fire departments across Mexico with the training and equipment they need, is one such organization that hurried to assist Texas survivors.
“We know this was a mission to come and help our brothers.”
The Texas floods may have been the first time that some Americans thought much about Mexican nonprofits, but international organizations have supported and continue to support the United States. Those relationships have grown more fraught following the Donald Trump administration’s abrupt shutdown of the US Agency of International Development.
Fundación 911
According to Los Angeles Times, in the wake of the 2025 flood, Fundación 911 sent a 40-person crew to Texas to help local first responders. Ismael Aldaba, president and founder of the organization based in Ciudad Acuña, a Mexican border town, told the paper that Fundación 911 immediately mobilized volunteers once they heard about the destruction.
“Once we learned [Kerr County was] affected, we knew we had to come down here. We know this was a mission to come and help our brothers,” Aldaba said. “We just [wanted] to make sure that we can work as fast as we can and try to make some headway with all the things we had to do.”
Fundación 911 brought cadaver dogs along with its volunteer crews who specialize in fast-water rescues. Another Mexican volunteer rescue organization based in Michoacán, Los Topos, brought the rescue expertise it has developed since Mexico’s 1985 earthquake. The organization has assisted with rescue efforts after disasters around the globe from Japan to Colombia. Patricia Campos, a Los Topos volunteer, told Austin’s KXAN, “We know the need there is, to find the children.”
Volunteers like Campos used the training Los Topos provides in first aid, navigating collapsed structures, firefighting, and managing search-and-rescue dogs. “What moved me here is wanting to support people without expecting anything in return,” Campos said. “This work is very beautiful, there are no words to explain it.”
Border communities also wrestle with specific issues, including health disparities.
Border Communities
Andy Carey, executive director of the US-Mexico Border Philanthropy Partnership (BPP), echoed this sense of connection in an interview with NPQ: “The US-Mexico border region is a community. We have a shared community and a shared destiny because when you live and work and play in the borderlands, you live and work and play on both sides of the border, in communities in both the United States and Mexico. We are inextricably linked.”
BPP, based in San Diego, CA, includes volunteers, donors, and partners in both the United States and Mexico. The organization also fundraises and provides educational, coaching, leadership, and other services in both countries. In addition, it serves and advocates for the distinct needs of the borderlands region.
According to BPP, neither the US nor the Mexican educational system is adept at meeting the needs of students from either side of the border, which the organization sees as a wasted opportunity for developing bilingual workers and leaders. Border communities also wrestle with specific issues, including health disparities that range from high poverty rates to a lack of water and inadequate access to healthcare, as well as the impacts of US migration policies and the politics around them.
Carey notes that BPP is positioned to help those who want to help nonprofits address both borderland issues and transnational issues. “We have helped channel $17 million in charitable giving in the last couple of years,” he said. “We provide fiscal-sponsorship services to 176 initiatives between the two countries. We can provide tax-deductibility receipts on either side of the border through our sister organization.”
Global Networks and “Friends of” Organizations
BPP is just one of many nonprofits facilitating support across borders. GlobalGiving, with offices in London and Washington, DC, is another organization that helps donors fund nonprofits in the United States and around the world. TechSoup Global Network helps provide resources and operations insight to over a million nonprofits globally by drawing on its network of more than 60 partner organizations on six continents. And InterAction, as the largest United States–based alliance of international nonprofits, mobilizes networks to help vulnerable people and people living in poverty around the world.
“There is a huge need for support on both sides of the border.”
Beyond direct support to international organizations, another way to support cross-border nonprofits like those that sent volunteers to the Texas flood is by establishing a “Friends of” 501c3 organization.
A “Friends of” organization is a nonprofit that is classified as a public charity to avoid the expenditure responsibility required when making grants directly to international organizations. According to the Council on Foundations, this type of organization “generally exists to provide federal tax deductibility for charitable contributions to support a foreign charity by breaking a ‘conduit’ flow of funds to the foreign charity.”
Establishing this type of organization can provide more sustained, formal support for international organizations. As BPP’s Carey noted, “There is a huge need for support on both sides of the border.”
For More on This Topic:
International Nonprofits After USAID: A View from the Global South
