NORTH WILKESBORO, N. C. (RNS) – Every week, in a large warehouse in this small mountain town in the west, workers at Samaritan’s Purse load semi-trailers full of materials for the Ukrainian population: medicines, food, tarpaulins, blankets, hygiene kits and school supplies. children’s bags.
The trucks are then driven 80 miles east of Piedmont Triad International Airport, where they are loaded onto the nonprofit’s specially configured DC-8 aircraft for up to 84,000 pounds of cargo. From there, the goods are transported by air to Poland and then transported by truck. across the border from Ukraine.
This week, Samaritan’s Purse, led by evangelical leader The Rev. Franklin Graham, has carried out its airlift since Russia launched its offensive against Ukraine in February.
The Christian humanitarian organization estimates that it has helped 5. 5 million Ukrainians with medicine, food and water. Early in the conflict, it operated an emergency box hospital and an outpatient clinic in Lviv, where it treated some 17,758 patients. It now supports 30 medical services during the war.
The organization’s 160,000-square-foot warehouse in North Wilkesboro employs another 385 people who purchase, repair and upgrade medical equipment, turbines and water filtration systems valued at millions of dollars, most of which have been donated. The warehouse has six emergency box hospitals. in conditions to be embarked, 4 with tents, hospital beds, anesthesiology equipment, X-ray machines and operating rooms, all designed to fold into the fuselage of an airplane. There are also miles of plastic sheets, mountains of used clothes, and boxes filled with brown teddy bears with the Samaritan’s Purse logo: a cross inside a circle.
Samaritan’s Purse, now in its 52nd year, has a faith-based foreign aid center.
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Ukraine now receives much of that aid, but every year the organization helps others in 110 to 120 countries. It sent materials to Pakistan after unprecedented flooding caused by monsoon rains last month. It has a cellular medical team in 11 other countries. It is helping farmers in Iraq’s Sinjar Mountains plant strawberries.
And then there are several recovery efforts founded in the United States. Groups of Samaritan’s Purse volunteers recently sawed tree branches and cleaned up broken homes in Kentucky and Missouri, where a series of disastrous floods destroyed homes and businesses.
The plan of the arrangement is based on the parable of the Good Samaritan narrated in the Gospel of Luke, in which a man is stripped naked, beaten and left for dead on the side of the road. He is rescued, not by those who have strength or authority, but through a stranger, a Samaritan, who bandages his wounds, takes him to an inn and pays the innkeeper to take care of him.
For many, Samaritan’s Purse is best known for giving shoeboxes full of toys to children in need around the world. But over the past 10 years, it has become one of the largest faith-based nonprofits in the United States, with annual revenues of $1 billion last year.
A review of its annual IRS Form 990 shows that Samaritan’s Purse’s earnings have doubled since 2014 and its assets have quadrupled. It is now ranked 23rd among the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s 25 most sensible American charities, a list that includes the most common non-religious charities.
Today, Samaritan’s Purse is in a league with the American Red Cross, Catholic and Lutheran charities in the United States. In 2020, it cashed out the Christian charity World Vision, with whom it has a founder: former missionary and evangelist Bob Pierce, Franklin Inspiration and Graham’s mentor.
This expansion is largely due to the strength of their frontline work in public health crises and herbal errors around the world.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, Samaritan’s Purse designed and assembled emergency box hospitals. In the last two years, it has put them into service in Italy; the Bahamas; New York; Los Angeles; Jackson, Mississippi; and Lenoir, North Carolina. His immediate reaction to emerging fitness crises was tested in 2014, when two members of his medical staff contracted the deadly Ebola virus while treating others in Liberia. They were evacuated to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta, where they were treated and recovered. .
“When we say we’re running into the fire, it’s not talk,” said Ken Isaacs, vice president of government systems and relations and the regulatory and logistical brains of the group’s complicated foreign company.
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Samaritan’s Purse has assembled a corps of Christian doctors, nurses and other fitness professionals who volunteer for hospital projects around the world and a group of national volunteers trained in debris removal, sludge and soft construction.
The organization’s headquarters are in the city of Boone, in the Blue Ridge Mountain domain of North Carolina. It has warehouses in Coppell, Texas and Fullerton, California, ticket offices in 17 countries around the world, and a pavilion in Alaska where it hosts wedding seminars for wounded infantrymen and law enforcement officers.
But unlike many other Christian charities, Samaritan’s Purse stands out in a special way: it has a motivating and polarizing leader.
“I think most people would find it difficult to name the president of Catholic Charities, World Vision or Compassion (International),” said David King, director of the Lake Institute on Faith.
As the son and successor of the Rev. Billy Graham and president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, Graham, 70, has an inordinate stature in the evangelical fold. With 10 million fans on Facebook and 2. 5 million fans on Twitter, he gets carried away by some of the most popular topics of the moment, attracting as many supporters as detractors for his conservative and partisan views.
He is a staunch supporter of former President Donald Trump; more recently, he criticized the FBI for raiding Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and claimed, erroneously, that Trump would return the documents if requested. A cultural warrior over the social issues of the day, whether it’s abortion, the same — sex, marriage or sexuality — Graham denounces what he sees as an atheistic America drifting through secular culture. return to her pastor husband’s house.
But when it comes to leading Samaritan’s Purse, he has also proven to be an effective leader committed to helping others in crisis in the most agile and resourceful way possible.
“Franklin has enjoyed the challenge of being temporarily involved and cutting red tape and bureaucracy,” said Mark DeMoss, a now-retired public relations manager who represented Graham. others and show (people) that you are on the ground. “
Graham is unconventional in more than one tactic. It does not rent corporations outdoors to produce direct mail calls. He doesn’t socialize with charity professionals.
“We’ve never raised funds outdoors,” Graham said in a phone interview. “We tell other people what we do and other people if they need to help us. “
Evangelicals responded. Graham says thousands of other people make small donations of $100 or less, and while that’s not entirely accurate, the charity accesses a wide network of donors, many of whom belong to evangelical circles.
Only 5. 1% of Samaritan’s Purse’s profits in 2021 came from federal dollars. In recent years, it has partnered with the U. S. Agency for International Development to provide assistance in Iraq, Sudan, Congo, Liberia, and Colombia. He has also worked with the United Nations World Food Programme, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the United Nations International Organization for Migration.
Despite Graham’s social views, Samaritan’s Purse is committed to offering to everyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, faith or sexual orientation. However, he will tell them about Jesus.
Part of Samaritan’s Purse’s expansion and financial fortune is possibly due to the Graham brand. Graham inherited from his evangelist father a reputation for private integrity and financial transparency.
“There was no scandal in Billy’s life, and I think that’s true for Franklin as well,” said Grant Wacker, a historian and of “America’s Pastor: Billy Graham and the Shaping of America. “it stayed on the right track in terms of non-public ethics. This creates coherence between the message and the public call.
While some donors may not be aware of Graham’s policy, Wacker said, some give exactly for that.
“The propensity to give a contribution is based on accepting it as true to,” he said. public life. “
The long-running program, introduced through Samaritan’s Purse in 1993, partners with local churches, which in turn recruit members to buy small gifts and wrap them in shoeboxes for young people in need around the world. (He also helped Samaritan’s Purse be reclassified through the IRS as a church arrangement. )The enthusiasm of the faithful for the program knows no limits. Samaritan’s Purse estimates it has 90,000 volunteers a year. In 2021, those volunteers packed up and shipped more than 10. 5 million shoeboxes worldwide.
Operation Christmas Child is still an exclusive program, but it is no longer the focal point of the organization. In 2001, more than a portion of the charity’s profits came from Operation Christmas Child, and about two-thirds of the organization’s expenses were spent on the program. , according to a report from 990. In 2021, less than a third of Samaritan’s Purse’s profits came from Operation Christmas Child, and the program accounted for about 44% of the organization’s expenses.
But relationships forged with churches donating shoeboxes or obtaining them for distribution have given the organization global success and fasting in the event of disaster.
Sergii Syzonekno, pastor of the Central Baptist Church in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro, had been involved in Operation Christmas Child for 8 years. When the war began, he, like other churches that were already members of Samaritan’s Purse’s Operation Christmas Child network, earned $5,000 in money.
This has now intensified with weekly shipments of supplies. The church opened its construction to space Ukrainians fleeing the war. Another 430 people slept there one night at the height of the war. Church volunteers use their own cars to get out and evacuate other people. besieged by the Russians and delivered food and water.
“We are very grateful to Samaritan’s Purse for the food and encouragement,” Syzonekno said. “We are partners. We do the paintings of God together.