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 In 2001, Compassion Australia’s founding CEO, Laurie McCowan, retired and was superseded by Paul O’Rourke, who saw 90,000 children supported through Compassion Australia before retiring in 2010.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:
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“I cannot be much pleased without an appearance of truth; at least of possibility—I wish the history to be natural though the sentiments are refined; and the characters to be probable, though their behaviour is excelling.”
—Frances Burney (1752–1840)