Who We Are
We're humanitarian professionals who spent over 15 years working for international NGOs across Myanmar and Southeast Asia, supporting local organizations through some of the region's most challenging crises.
During that time, we watched a genuine infrastructure gap emerge. INGOs built excellent systems for bilateral funding — vetting, accountability, fund transfer, reporting — all designed for government and institutional donors. Those systems work well. But private philanthropy and corporate ESG spending were growing steadily, and the infrastructure to route those funds accountably to local organizations simply didn't exist.
Local organizations doing exceptional work had no reliable pathway to the private funding that could supplement what bilateral donors provide. The pipes for private funding were never built.
So we built them. Story of Helping is the proof of concept — the first connector agency on The Aid Cloud platform, opening a private funding channel for local organizations in Myanmar and Southeast Asia.
Our team includes senior humanitarian leaders with decades of combined experience establishing operations, managing large-scale programs, and building capacity across Myanmar and Southeast Asia—including an Asia-Paciific Obama Leader and certified regional trainers. We speak local languages, understand contexts deeply, and have the operational expertise to make this model work.
Our co-founders’ article making the underlying infrastructure argument has been accepted for print publication in the Stanford Social Innovation Review.
The Gap We Saw
During our years working across Myanmar and Thailand, we watched humanitarian need grow exponentially while traditional funding sources stagnated or withdrew.
Globally, 362 million people need humanitarian assistance. Yet institutional donors—governments, UN agencies, major foundations—can't keep pace with growing need. Funding concentrates in high-profile crises while "forgotten" contexts receive minimal resources. And local organizations, despite having deep community trust and expertise, receive less than 5% of humanitarian funding directly — nearly a decade after the Grand Bargain committed to 25% by 2020.
This was not a failure of political will — the commitments were genuine. It was an infrastructure gap. The systems that exist were built for bilateral donors. Private funding requires different infrastructure: different vetting frameworks, different accountability documentation, different payment mechanisms.
Until now, nobody has built it for the humanitarian sector. So we built it.
Why Myanmar (for now)
We're starting with Myanmar because that's where we worked, where we have relationships, and where we understand context deeply. Humanitarian work requires more than professional skills—it requires understanding local dynamics, speaking the language, and knowing when to listen rather than advise.
Our team brings both: professional expertise in project management, financial oversight, and content creation, combined with years of in-country experience and language capabilities. This combination makes our one-team structure possible—we can provide real implementation support, not just remote oversight.
We expand through people, not markets. As we grow, we'll add team members with deep expertise in other contexts—Thailand, Bangladesh, Ukraine, or elsewhere. But we won't work somewhere just because there's need or market opportunity. We'll only expand where we can maintain the quality, authenticity, and partnership depth that defines our model.
For now, that's Myanmar and along the Thailand border. And we'd rather do projects in these contexts exceptionally well than stretch ourselves thin trying to work everywhere.
The Team
Nandar Hlaing — Co-Founder
2023 Asia Pacific Obama Leader. 16+ years of humanitarian leadership in Myanmar and Southeast Asia,
with deep relationships across the local organization ecosystem that Story of Helping serves.
Jose Ravano — Co-Founder
15+ years of senior humanitarian experience with INGOs and the International Red Cross.
Former Chief of Party for a USAID-funded post-coup program in Myanmar — bringing institutional
knowledge of exactly the intermediary processes that The Aid Cloud is standardizing.
How We Work
Story of Helping is a humanitarian creative agency and The Aid Cloud's first connector agency. The Aid Cloud provides the accountability infrastructure we operate on — vetting frameworks, milestone-based disbursement verification, funder dashboards, and Marketplace access. Our staff work directly with local organizations. The Aid Cloud records and verifies; we handle the partner relationship, project support, and content production.
Expansion Philosophy
We're interested in many contexts where local organizations face similar challenges - Ukraine, Bangladesh, and elsewhere. But we'll only work where we can maintain the depth, quality, and authenticity that defines our model. This means we need to first find those humanitarian professionals who have an understanding of the context, can speak the language and can properly provide support in those locations before launching stories from these other contexts.