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Service Spring 2006

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Friendship Acres
Photo: CWS archives

CWS at 60 -- A tradition of help. A legacy of hope.

Glimpses of Our History — photo and story gallery

RealPlayerView Video: CWS - 60 Years of Help and Hope - 10/06  (8:32, requires RealPlayer™)
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In 1946, in the aftermath of World War II, Church World Service was born. Its mission was clear: Feed the hungry. Clothe the naked. Heal the sick. Comfort the aged. Shelter the homeless.

Highlights of six decades of learning and growing

CWS ministered to the people recovering in war-torn Europe and Asia: U.S. churches provided more than 11 million pounds of food, clothing, and medical supplies to these neighbors in need. In 1946, CWS provided 80 percent of all the relief supplies from U.S. voluntary agencies to Europe and Asia.

In 1947, Church World Service joined with Lutheran World Relief and the Catholic Rural Life Conference to create a joint community hunger appeal -- the Christian Rural Overseas Program, CROP. This was a move that was to have significant impact on CWS's fund-raising and awareness-raising activities in the decades to follow.

CROP gathered donations of corn, wheat, rice, and beans from farmers across the U.S. Heartland. CROP Friendship Trains collected 5,500 rail carloads of grain, which were shipped to Europe from 1948-52. The Friendship Trains evolved into the Friendship Food Ships, and soon they were transporting food to Italy, Greece, Central Europe, Israel, Jordan, Turkey, and India.

Through its sister agency, CROP, CWS was instrumental in drafting the Food for Peace law, PL 480, that to this day enables private voluntary agencies to distribute U.S. government surplus commodities overseas.

Friendship Food shipment, 1950
Friendship Food shipment, 1950
Photo: CWS archives

In the 1950s, together with Lutheran World Relief, CWS provided food and housing for Palestinian refugees at a time when even the United Nations was paying little attention to the crisis.

Also in the '50s, CWS began to expand the geographic locus of its ministry to Africa and Latin America. Toward the end of the decade, the first CWS food-for-work project was started in Haiti. This was a sea change as the emphasis shifted from giving out food, to helping people find their own unique solutions to the basic causes of hunger and poverty.

In the early to mid '60s, 20 million CWS-supplied forest and fruit trees were planted in Algeria, utilizing more than 5.5 million human days of volunteer labor -- and helping to stem the encroachment of the desert.

Later in the decade, CWS led a joint church operation to airlift 50,000 tons of emergency supplies to the people of the war-ravaged and starving breakaway republic of Biafra, in Africa.

Also in the late '60s, the CROP Walk was born. George Sturgeon, CROP director for the Dakotas, was one of the first to organize walks to support the CROP cause. The walk itself would serve as a total community witness of concern -- in this case, for hungry people.

Sturgeon, along with Rev. Roger Burtner and others, pioneered the event into the nationwide phenomenon it is today, involving some 2,000 communities and raising some $16 million -- and an untold amount of awareness -- to help hungry people here and around the world.

The 1970s and 1980s witnessed a series of benchmark events for Church World Service:

  • $4 million to rebuild new homes for 20,000 people in Guatemala in the wake of the worst earthquake to ever hit the area.

  • A shipload of wheat for Vietnam, needed to feed people in orphanages and hospitals.

  • After the fall of the Khmer Rouge, working with the Cuban Council of Churches to hire teams of Cuban veterinarians to train Cambodian villagers to care for their own livestock.

  • The provision of medical teams and relief supplies to assist in famine recovery in Ethiopia.

  • Co-founding the Burma Border Consortium, to assist persecuted Burmese fleeing into neighboring Thailand, helping to meet the refugees' survival needs of food, shelter, blankets, and mosquito nets.

In the '90s, domestic needs often took the forefront, with assistance for long-term recovery efforts after Hurricane Andrew devastated South Florida; interfaith recovery efforts in Oklahoma City following the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building; and raising more than $8.1 million in cash and in-kind resources for the Burned Churches Fund, helping to rebuild African-American churches in the U.S. destroyed by arson.

Recognition also grew that poverty and hunger are most often symptoms of unjust policies and systems. With that reality in mind, CWS expanded the energy and resources it put into education and public policy advocacy in the U.S. CWS, for example, became an influential part of the worldwide campaign to ban landmines, and as the century turned, CWS was a major player in the Jubilee 2000 campaign to relieve the debt burden that is choking developing nations.

With the new millennium, trauma counseling and debriefing services became part of the long-term CWS response, born in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Known today as the STAR program -- Strategies on Trauma Awareness and Resilience -- this work is making a difference globally.
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