Tiny Foundation Is a Charitable Giant : Pittsburgh: The nonprofit organization Brother’s Brother has helped about 40 million people worldwide over the last four decades.

In a battered brick warehouse, a tiny nonprofit organization operates as a giant of charitable efficiency, shipping tons of medical equipment, textbooks and agricultural supplies around the world.

Over the last four decades, this little-known organization--Brother’s Brother--has distributed $500 million worth of supplies, helping about 40 million individuals in more than 100 countries from Barbuda to Zimbabwe.

While some charities operate expensive phone solicitations and mail campaigns, Brother’s Brother does almost no fund raising. Its staff of 11 collects tax-deductible contributions of goods--known as gifts-in-kind--from manufacturers, hospitals and book publishers.

Brother’s Brother spends less than 1% of its $40-million annual income on fund-raising and administration.

Money magazine last year listed Brother’s Brother as the nation’s most efficient gift-in-kind charity, and the Chronicle of Philanthropy recently listed the foundation’s executive salaries as the lowest among 184 charitable organizations.

The survey showed that 154 of the groups paid their top executives more than $100,000. Luke L. Hingson, president of Brother’s Brother, earns $49,000.

The foundation has carefully managed its growth, kept overhead low and concentrated only on doing what it can do well, said Vice President Linn M. Swanson.

Supplies are stockpiled until they fill a shipping container. Operating tables, crutches and boxes of bedpans, books and vegetable seeds clutter the warehouse, marked with hand-lettered signs of their destinations.

Outside, workmen load gurneys, syringes, surgical masks, forceps and other equipment into a 25,000-pound shipping container bound for the Philippines.

Low fund-raising and advertising costs are part of the foundation’s efficiency. But it’s also the reason for its relative anonymity in the United States.

“We’re better known in Jamaica than we are in Pittsburgh,” Swanson said.

In the foundation’s modest office, a photograph shows a half-dozen of the original Brother’s Brother volunteers posing with humanitarian Albert Schweitzer in Africa on their first international effort in 1958.

One of the men is Hingson’s father.

Dr. Robert A. Hingson, a pioneering anesthesiologist at Cleveland’s Case Western University, founded Brother’s Brother in 1958. He also is the inventor of the “peace gun,” a high-pressure injector that has immunized more than 10 million people in underdeveloped countries.

The foundation’s work grew out of foreign trips the doctors made to deliver supplies and to treat poor patients. The elder Hingson moved the foundation from Cleveland to Pittsburgh in 1968 when he joined a local hospital’s staff.

“Maybe people can grow more food or better crops than they used to or get well faster from an illness because of what we’ve done,” Luke Hingson said.

A big heart isn’t enough to fill the need and keep costs down. Acquiring and managing the supplies requires the craftiness of a scrounging supply sergeant and the judgment of a diplomat.

Staffers must navigate through a tangle of foreign regulations and negotiate with officials. And they must nurture a respect for local customs, beliefs and conditions.

Brother’s Brother receives frequent shipments from a host of donors, such as drug manufacturer Eli Lilly & Co., publisher J.P. Lippincott and the H.J. Heinz Co.

It then tries to match those supplies with specific requests from foreign governments, international aid organizations, hospitals and groups in the United States.

The foundation relies on existing aid groups, churches and local organizations to ensure supplies are distributed abroad.

Delivery sometimes can be deadly. Shipments to unstable areas such as Somalia, Rwanda and the former Yugoslav federation present security problems.

“I’ve told our people overseas that if you’re close enough to get shot at, you’re fired,” Hingson said.

But there’s an even greater danger--disillusionment. The foundation has lost shipments to theft and corruption. And in the Third World, aid workers often become witnesses to desperation.

Brother’s Brother Foundation can be reached at Suite 305, 1501 Reedsdale St., Pittsburgh, Pa. 15233-2341.