I've often traveled to New York for the opening week of the UN General Assembly, but this year I'm honored to join other civil society leaders at President Barack Obama's Leaders' Summit on Refugees. And U.S. civil society, once again, has stepped up to demonstrate its ongoing commitment to helping affected people lift themselves out of hardship in a time of historic humanitarian need.

The passage of the Global Food Security Act of 2016 by the U.S Congress represents an impressive feat in collective action and collaboration to #endhunger. Over the course of almost a decade, organizations of all types and sizes connected to mobilize advocates, schedule meetings with members of Congress, host briefings with Capitol Hill staff, and discuss strategy together.

Fifteen minutes before the gray, 12-foot gate of the garment factory compound in Myanmar’s Hlaing Thar Yar industrial zone opens to release workers, vendors selling fried chicken on sticks and bags of nuts gather in anticipation. At a designated time, the guards roll back the gate and the vendors push their heavy carts up a steep hill and into the compound. If they hesitate, they are locked out as guards quickly close the gate behind them.

Humanitarians around the world have devoted their lives to the needs of others. Once a year, on World Humanitarian Day, the world takes time to honor them.

I grew up in an Air Force community and was gratefully mentored towards my goal to be a nurse by an Air Force nurse. Talks of relocation and life in “foreign countries” were shared by childhood friends. I too wanted to travel, learn first-hand about lands, people, their cultures and their ways of living. Due to my role as a full time University-based nursing educator from 1974 to 2001, along with raising children, travel out of the Continental United States wasn’t possible.

In 2011, Publish What You Fund’s chief executive, Rupert Simons, was working in Ethiopia on a program to get better seeds to farmers. His program was one of several run by different government agencies, NGOs and donors. Despite great effort, the results were disappointing. It took several years to fully understand why – the seeds from government farms had been contaminated by inter-breeding.

Sometimes we hear philanthropic foundations described as “snowflakes.” They each have their own unique set of strategies, their own orientation towards change, their own impact measurements, their own proposal formats, and even their own unique language for describing the work they do, (as one foundation so succinctly told me, “ag funding isn’t just ag funding”).