History
Compassion started in 1952 when Reverend Everett Swanson felt compelled to help 35 orphaned children in South Korea. By 1977, Compassion was supporting more than 25,000 children. In the same year, Compassion Australia was established by Laurie and Olive McCowan from an office in their Newcastle home. Compassion Limited of Australia was officially registered in 1978 and saw over 1000 children sponsored by Australians in its first three years alone.
Compassion was one of the first non-government agencies to respond to the Rwandan genocide in 1994, raising one million dollars to support the widows and orphans left traumatised by the civil war. In 2001, Compassion Australia’s founding CEO, Laurie McCowan, retired and was superseded by Paul O’Rourke, who saw 90,000 children supported through Compassion Australia before retiring in 2010. Dr Tim Hanna took the reins as CEO in June 2010. Compassion Australia currently works with ten partner countries: United States, Canada, The Netherlands, Germany, France, Switzerland, New Zealand, Italy, South Korea and the United Kingdom.
Read more about this topic: Compassion Australia
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“It’s a very delicate surgical operation—to cut out the heart without killing the patient. The history of our country, however, is a very tough old patient, and we’ll do the best we can.”
—Dudley Nichols, U.S. screenwriter. Jean Renoir. Sorel (Philip Merivale)
“If you look at history you’ll find that no state has been so plagued by its rulers as when power has fallen into the hands of some dabbler in philosophy or literary addict.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)