Look around Caitlin Tulloch's home in Oakland, California, and it's clear that the world outside the U.S. has made an impression on her.

"This is a really lovely piece of embroidery that I bought in a town called Mae Hong Son in Thailand," she says, gesturing to a red tapestry woven through with geometric forms. She has other textiles, too — from Guatemala, Indonesia, Kenya, Laos and Uzbekistan. Some she's purchased in person while abroad. Others she's received as gifts.

On her office door is a little gold placard that her husband had made for her. It reads: "Caitlin Tulloch, Grand Poobah of Cost Effectiveness."

Tulloch is an economist. And cost effectiveness is what she has focused on for more than a decade. She uses data to work towards the biggest humanitarian bang for the buck: saving more lives, educating more children and lifting more people out of poverty as affordably and effectively as possible.

This is the work she'd been doing while on staff at USAID since 2023 when, earlier this year, DOGE and the Trump administration began pausing and then shutting down thousands of the agency's contracts. Funding for most of the foreign aid agency's programs evaporated almost overnight.

"It was all very confusing," recalls Tulloch. "But in a very, very short period of time, what USAID had historically been doing was just wiped off the map."

Tulloch was let go and reinstated by the agency multiple times before ultimately resigning. It was around that time that she and several colleagues, some of whom had been laid off, went on to create a special kind of matchmaking service. They call themselves Project Resource Optimization (PRO).

The idea was simple — out of the ashes of the dismantling of much of U.S. foreign assistance, Tulloch and her team would guide philanthropists who want to help but are uncertain how to do so.

Read the full article about funding international initiatives by Ari Daniel at WPRL.