The Lazarus Partners concept was introduced over 27 years ago by Brendan Wood International. Inspired by Christmas, the first Lazarus project and those which have followed have consistently united the professional skills of Brendan Wood International with the selection of charitable organizations which define outperformance.

Lazarus Partners engages volunteers amongst our employees and friends, seeking out humanitarian organizations who view those they serve as “clients” and treat their benefactors as “investors”. Lazarus looks for charitable organizations with effective and innovative solutions to underlying causes rather than those who treat symptoms alone.

Lazarus Partners celebrates and promotes transparent accountability as a key quality of any humanitarian organization. We want to advance benchmarks of achievement which increase the power of every dollar invested. Lazarus Partners seeks out the charities who provide the highest possible percentage of the funding dollar directly to the recipient/client and whose volunteerism is equally outstanding.

Finally, Lazarus acts as the “Voice of the Client” in a world of faceless, voiceless and powerless recipients too often seen and treated solely as charity cases. Lazarus is especially sensitive and responsive to organizations which confront danger in treacherous theatres of operation with courage and faith. Lazarus believes that one of the fundamental financial disciplines guiding charity is the vow of poverty and treats religious organizations adhering to this virtue accordingly.

Over the years, Lazarus Partners has enlisted the moral and financial support of more than 1000 volunteers comprised of Brendan Wood International partners, employees, clients, advisors, families and friends. We have invested considerably and worked hard, never to perfection, and never without fault. The challenge is great and in many ways we have only just begun.

Voice of the Client This Christmas finds Lazarus Partners “on the move” again embracing changes which we trust will better serve our “clients.” This year’s mantra is the “saving of lives”. It has unfolded over the years that the harder we searched for charitable organizations who met the Lazarus performance tests, the more consistently we encountered humanitarian teams who measured themselves against the toughest standards and could actually quantify their achievements in the “saving of lives”.

The Tree of Life This new theme very much captures Lazarus Partners aspirations in our third decade of common giving. Having developed effective disciplines for choosing high performance charities over the years, we have now identified the dynamic roots in our tree of life. These root organizations can yield an enormous harvest of “saved lives”. Our mood and spirit is to maximize the level of our giving and add as many new clients as we can to the number of precious lives it is our privilege to help save. The Lazarus Tree of Life will be illuminated case by case this Christmas by the light of our gifts and intentions. No gift is too small to add to the rich fruit this Tree of Life produces in a world of suffering and adversity.

Lazarus Partners