CARE
CARE (Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere, formerly Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe) is a major international humanitarian agency delivering emergency relief and long-term international development projects. Founded in 1945, CARE is nonsectarian, impartial, and non-governmental. It is one of the largest and oldest humanitarian aid organizations focused on fighting global poverty. In 2016, CARE reported working in 94 countries, supporting 962 poverty-fighting projects and humanitarian aid projects, and reaching over 80 million people and 256 million people indirectly.
CARE’s programs in the developing world address a broad range of topics including emergency response, food security, water and sanitation, economic development, climate change, agriculture, education, and health. CARE also advocates at the local, national, and international levels for policy change and the rights of poor people. Within each of these areas, CARE focuses on empowering and meeting the needs of women and girls and promoting gender equality. CARE International is a confederation of fourteen CARE National Members, each of which is registered as an autonomous non-profit non-governmental organization in the country and four affiliate members.
Empowering Women and Girls
Why does CARE fight poverty by focusing on girls and women? In the world’s poorest communities, girls and women bear the brunt of poverty. Fighting poverty in those communities requires focusing on girls and women to achieve equality. When families struggle to grow enough food to eat or earn enough money to send all their kids to school, it’s the girls who are often the last to eat and first to be kept home from school. In these same communities, it’s the women who are frequently denied the right to own the land they’ve farmed their entire lives. And where girls and women are denied freedom to leave their homes or walk down a street, they struggle to earn a living, attend school or even visit a doctor. But girls and women aren’t just the faces of the poverty; they’re also the key to overcoming it. CARE’s nearly seven decades of experience makes clear that when you empower a girl or a woman, she becomes a catalyst for positive change whose success benefits everyone around her.
Our community-based efforts to improve education, health and economic opportunity for girls and women don’t just benefit those girls and women. They benefit the boys and men around them – their husbands, sons, brothers, and fathers. Poverty is directly connected to gender inequality. Men and boys in the communities where we work increasingly understand this and are vital partners in our programs to empower girls and women. The communities where men and boys are most actively engaged in our work, real and lasting change is more likely to take hold; change that benefits everyone.
The Original CARE Package®
CARE was founded in 1945 when 22 American organizations came together to rush lifesaving CARE Packages to survivors of World War II. Thousands of Americans, including President Harry S. Truman, contributed to the effort. On May 11, 1946, the first 15,000 packages reached the battered port of Le Havre, France. These early packages were U.S. Army surplus “10-in-1” food parcels intended to provide one meal for 10 soldiers during the planned invasion of Japan. We obtained them at the end of the war and began a service that let Americans send the packages to friends and families in Europe, where millions were in danger of starvation. Ten dollars bought a CARE Package and guaranteed that its addressee would receive it within four months.
“Every CARE Package is a personal contribution to the world peace our nation seeks. It expresses America’s concern and friendship in a language all peoples understand.” – President John F. Kennedy, 1962
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