Look to your right. You are standing outside the headquarters of an organization that has quite literally changed the world. This is the Chanin Building, and since nineteen ninety-four, it has been the global nerve center for the International Rescue Committee, or the I-R-C.
Now, if you want to talk about origin stories, this one is tough to beat. Picture this. It is nineteen thirty-one in Germany, and a group of left-wing political factions forms the International Relief Association to help victims of state oppression. By nineteen thirty-three, when the Nazis took power, a brilliant, frizzy-haired physicist decided he needed to step in. Yes, Albert Einstein himself helped form an American branch to assist those fleeing Adolf Hitler's government.
Let me tell you about one of their most dramatic chapters. In nineteen forty, a man named Varian Fry went to Marseille, France, for the Emergency Rescue Committee, a group that would soon merge with Einstein's organization. Fry arrived just weeks after the fall of France. He pulled together a scrappy, underground team and spent thirteen months smuggling over two thousand political, cultural, and academic leaders out of Vichy France, right under the noses of the Nazis. He even passed a map of Mediterranean minefields from a refugee straight to British intelligence. Talk about a real-life spy thriller.
In nineteen forty-two, after the U-S entered the Second World War, these groups merged to form the International Rescue Committee. Fast forward to today, and the I-R-C is a global humanitarian titan. Led by their C-E-O, former British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, they operate in more than forty countries and twenty-six U-S cities. In twenty twenty-four alone, they reached an astonishing thirty-six and a half million people with humanitarian services. They are the first responders who show up when the world falls apart, whether it is helping Ukrainian refugees keep their homes warm during winter, or setting up mobile health clinics in crisis zones.
Take a look at your screen for a glimpse of this global reach. You will see a photo of an I-R-C doctor conducting a check-up on a young Syrian refugee in a clinic in Jordan, a perfect example of their life-saving health programs. And if you check the next image, you can see a great shot of the Chanin Building itself, this very skyscraper you are standing in front of, which has housed these incredible efforts for decades. The I-R-C tackles everything from emergency response to resettling refugees, earning a top-tier A rating from CharityWatch along the way. They operate on a massive budget of hundreds of millions of dollars, yet they remain remarkably efficient, with the vast majority of their funding going straight to the people who need it most.
If you ever need to stop by their offices, they are open Monday through Friday from nine A-M to five P-M. Take a moment to look up at the building and imagine the millions of lives touched by the work done right inside those doors, and when you are ready, we can head to our next stop.
