About the International Rescue Committee

The International Rescue Committee responds to the world’s worst humanitarian crises and helps people survive, recover, and rebuild their lives. We restore safety, dignity, and hope to millions of people who are uprooted. The IRC leads the way from harm to home.

With regional headquarters in New York, Washington, D.C., London, Brussels, Geneva, Bangkok and Nairobi, the organization has operations in more than 40 countries across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. In the United States, the IRC operates a 25-city network of refugee resettlement offices. The IRC has a global workforce of more than 18,000.

History

The IRC was founded in 1933, at the suggestion of Albert Einstein, to rescue families fleeing persecution in Germany. Over the years, we have continued to respond to the needs of people escaping conflict and disaster in countries around the world, including Vietnam, Pakistan, Uganda, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Syria.

Today, with 82 years of experience, the IRC sets high standards for delivering emergency aid, protecting children, providing healthcare, preventing and responding to violence against women and girls, safeguarding human rights and kick-starting economic recovery.

The IRC’s work

Every year, through emergency relief, reconstruction, protection of human rights, post-disaster recovery and advocacy with policy makers, the IRC helps millions of people around the world.

The IRC’s work focuses on the root causes of conflict and its impact on people, communities and societal institutions. It generally works at the local and mid-local level, partnering with civilian populations, civil society groups, district and provincial governments, and market sector actors to find durable solutions to issues causing and created by conflict.

Across all of its programs, the IRC is committed to the full empowerment and participation of women and girls. The IRC provides reproductive health care to mothers, supports survivors of sexual violence, and creates economic opportunities for women and girls who face enormous obstacles. Through innovative skills programs, the IRC helps women gain economic independence.

The IRC’s work in post-conflict settings focuses on structural responses, in part driven by community-based approaches, which can be replicated, emphasizing coherence between:

1. Social programs: The IRC places specific emphasis on rebuilding the health, public infrastructure and education sectors, linking grass-roots interventions with sustainable development. Additionally, it is committed as an organization to working with communities on programming surrounding gender based violence beyond emergencies. The IRC helps survivors heal and works with communities and institutions to break the cycle of violence.

1. Health programs: In 2014, the IRC provided 16 million people with primary health care, reproductive health care, environmental health, child survival, treatment and prevention of blindness and assistance for victims of sexual violence. IRC experts in primary care, environmental health, reproductive health, epidemiology, child survival, and emergency medicine ensure that IRC programs use cutting edge public health tools in accordance with best-practice standards for humanitarian aid. The IRC is also committed to contributing to the development of the science and practice of humanitarian assistance and has undertaken a variety of research studies on public health published in various peer-reviewed journals.

1. Economic programs: Extreme poverty, exacerbated by the socio-economic impact of war, can create circumstances conducive to renewed violence. If stability is ever to hold and reconstruction is to be sustainable, then effort must focus on rebuilding the livelihoods and economic development capacity of conflict-impacted communities. One of the key issues in post-conflict societies is that of youth unemployment. Commonly in these settings, youth comprise a large proportion of the population and often head households. The IRC’s Economic Recovery and Development Unit (ERDU) programs are implemented using field tested best practices for economic and livelihood recovery and development.

1. Governance programs: The IRC seeks to assist communities not only after but also during conflict to create basic institutions responsive to the populations’ needs, to ensure that communities have a voice within those institutions and also have the capacity to manage them for their own socio-economic development. This is expressed in programs designed to support civil society, enhance protection and the rule of law, and rebuild ties between local governments and their constituencies, especially in conjunction with decentralization policies.

The IRC’s operational domains

1. Emergency Response: Emergency response is one of the IRC’s globally recognized strengths and this capacity consistently puts the IRC on the frontlines of the world’s worst crises. Currently the IRC is responding to crises in Jordan and Lebanon on their border with Syria, in drought-stricken areas of the Horn of Africa and Africa’s Sahel Region, in Yemen, and eastern Congo, among others.

The IRC’s emergency response teams include coordinators, logisticians, doctors, and water and sanitation experts, along with specialists who focus on human rights protection, the special needs of children in crisis, the prevention of sexual violence, and aid for rape survivors.

1. Post-Conflict Development: The IRC is usually among the first organizations to respond to a crisis and it also stays throughout the post-conflict recovery phase, such as in Afghanistan, Congo, and Liberia. The IRC conducts programs along the continuum of relief through post-conflict aid, supporting conflict-impacted communities and countries in their transition to sustainable peace and development. In addition to providing humanitarian assistance, IRC development efforts also seek to restore and strengthen physical and social institutions and to rebuild social cohesion, trust, and confidence. It is through these combined efforts that the IRC believes it can best help communities and countries stabilize and normalize toward durable solutions and sustainable peace.

1. Resettling Refugees: The IRC helps refugees who are admitted to the United States to establish new lives and become self-sufficient, productive citizens who add to the vitality and promise of the country. In 2014, the IRC’s 25 resettlement offices helped resettle 10,900 newly arrived refugees and provided services to promote self-reliance and integration to over 36,000 refugees, asylees, victims of human trafficking and other immigrants. IRC staff members and volunteers believe that refugees’ greatest resources are themselves. The IRC helps them translate their skills, interests and past experiences into assets that are valuable in their new communities. More than 3,000 local citizens assisted the IRC’s resettlement offices as volunteers.