A Swiss Foundation for the Displaced
A world where losing your home does not mean losing your future.
Losing a home takes a day. The years between losing one’s place in the world and finding a new one are where childhoods, identities, careers, assets, and rights disappear. We exist to end displacement as a way of life.
Our Vision
A world where losing your home does not mean losing your future.
Our Mission
End displacement as a way of life.
Where displacement can be foreseen, we help people move early, safely, and by choice. Where it cannot, we reduce its duration. In every case, we work to confer agency as quickly as possible, so that possessions are the only loss.
Why Now
In the decades ahead, climate change, water scarcity, and spreading conflict will displace far more people than the last century’s institutions were built to serve. However strongly those institutions recover, some gaps are structural: money that moves before a crisis, trust that reaches local responders, rights that travel with the person. IFD exists to bridge those gaps, with instruments designed to be adopted and run by the system itself.
How We Work
Where the public system cannot act, private conviction can.
Private capital, with discretion and speed
Able to act in days, and to hold a portfolio that includes what others consider too early or too uncertain: projects chosen for their potential to return something significant to the world. Success and failure are defined before each test starts, and the results are published either way.
A network of rare experience
Members of The Vine have built industries, sat on boards, and worked inside the institutions where displaced people meet closed doors. Often what blocks a working life is a rule still on the books that no one has reexamined. When the case for change comes from a peer rather than a petitioner, it gets heard.
Building what’s missing, together
Where a solution requires a tool that does not yet exist, our Lab develops it in close collaboration with the organizations that already hold the data, the standards, and the delivery. Sensitive tools are transferred to permanent operators; everything else is released as open source.
Everything we do is held to a single test: does it increase the dignity, agency, and independence of displaced people?
Our Role
We complement the existing system.
Established organizations deliver services to displaced people. IFD funds their programs, connects them to the employers, officials, and institutions our network can reach, builds the tools they are missing, measures the results, and hands what works to permanent operators.
We take on the interstitial challenges no single organization has been able to own. Chief among them: opening safe pathways to real work for the most vulnerable. And we are built so that agencies, governments, employers, insurers, and other funders can adopt and run what we prove.
Partnerships
IFD is in active discussions with academic, humanitarian, and philanthropic organizations worldwide, with first initiatives taking shape in 2026.
People
Board of Governance
Paul is CEO of The Vine Global Impact Foundation, the philanthropic network through which IFD was created. He spent his earlier career in private banking and portfolio management, including at Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch, and is an advocate against human trafficking.
David has led technology responses to national emergencies, including the United States' bioterrorism preparedness and response program, and served as a senior national intelligence executive. He chairs the Accelerator for the Alfred Loomis Innovation Council at the Stimson Center and advises governments and international bodies on data and AI.
Krista has spent twenty-five years working across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors on digital trust and inclusive digital identity. She founded the consultancy Imperative Impact, co-founded Wavemakers, a work-integrated learning program delivered in virtual reality, and serves on the board of the human rights education organization Equitas.
Board of Advisors
Sharron is an attorney and finance specialist with thirty years of experience in infrastructure and development finance across Africa and emerging Asia. She is co-founder and CEO of Resilience Technologies, chairs the board of Shared Interest, which mobilizes capital for communities in Southern Africa, and has taught project finance at the University of Cape Town's Graduate School of Business.
David has spent more than twenty-five years in crisis management and humanitarian operations, including as the ICRC's Head of Crisis Management and Security and as director of the UK government's operations team for conflict and humanitarian affairs. He is Head of Crisis Management at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy.
Florian is an impact investor and co-founder of Human Planet, formerly KOIS Advisory. His work in blended finance includes financing facilities for water systems serving refugee communities in Jordan and Iraq, built with UNICEF, and he serves on the board of ForAfrika, an African-led humanitarian organization.
Diane is co-founder and president of BR Public Relations, a New York communications agency. She has spent three decades leading campaigns for organizations ranging from startups to global brands and cultural institutions.
Lual is a South Sudanese game developer and peace advocate, born during his family's flight from war and raised over twenty-two years in a refugee camp, where he taught himself to program. He founded Junub Games and the Lual Mayen Foundation, which trains displaced young people in technology.
Scientific and Policy Advisory Council
Stavroula is a social anthropologist at the University of St Andrews and founding director of its Centre for Minorities Research. Her work documents how minority and displaced communities secure representation and rights, including a major study of forced child relocation in postwar Italy.
Solomzi is deputy director of the EssentialTech Centre at EPFL in Lausanne, which develops technologies for humanitarian and development use. A biomedical engineer and entrepreneur, he has advised the South African and Swiss governments on science and innovation policy.
Executive Team
Simon founded IFD. A British-Irish-Brazilian entrepreneur with a background in risk mitigation and disaster resilience, he has worked in emergency and hazardous-materials response in the United States and United Kingdom and founded Resilient JC, a nonprofit for community disaster preparedness.
Robert founded and led UN Global Pulse, the UN Secretary-General's innovation initiative on data and AI, for thirteen years, with labs in New York, Jakarta, and Kampala. He built the United Nations' first data-science team and oversaw development of its first digital twin of a refugee camp. His teams' tools and analyses have been deployed with UNHCR, WHO, and the World Food Programme. Formerly of Microsoft and the Google-backed InSTEDD, he leads IFD's innovation work, including the Lab.
Nermin leads IFD's programs, from the needs assessment that shapes them to the partnerships that deliver them. A specialist in disaster preparedness, migration, and community resilience, she has consulted for UN agencies, built emergency-response plans adopted as FEMA standards, and represents Business and Professional Women International at the UN on migration.
Governance
The International Foundation for the Displaced is a Swiss nonprofit backed by The Vine Global Impact Foundation, a private, invitation-only global network of family offices, philanthropists, and world leaders working across humanity’s hardest challenges.
Get in Touch
For partnership, funding, and press enquiries.
We welcome conversations with funders, established organizations, and institutions who share our conviction that displacement need not be a way of life.
info@ifd.earth