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 In 2001, Compassion Australia’s founding CEO, Laurie McCowan, retired and was superseded by Paul O’Rourke, who saw 90,000 children supported through Compassion Australia before retiring in 2010.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:
“We may pretend that we’re basically moral people who make mistakes, but the whole of history proves otherwise.”
—Terry Hands (b. 1941)
“I feel as tall as you.”
—Ellis Meredith, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 14, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)