A global force for good in our backyard

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Samaritan’s Purse, 13th on the Forbes list of the 100 largest U.S. charities, says that water purifiers, emergency vehicles, field hospital gear, and other aid materials loaded onto its Boeing 757 or DC-8 can deploy anywhere in the world within 36 hours.
 
But when the rushing water skinned the crust from the hills in western North Carolina, the Boone-headquartered humanitarian organization’s theater of operations narrowed to its own backyard.
 
In the weeks that followed, Samaritan’s Purse helped execute what has been called the largest civilian air operation in American history. Black Hawks and Chinooks, along with smaller, privately-owned helicopters, flew more than 350 missions. According to Business NC, they delivered 3,800 generators, 7,700 heaters, nearly 25,000 food bags, and 22,000 gallons of fuel, among other supplies.
 
Samaritan’s Purse, founded in the 1970s, has grown into a ten-figure charity over the past decade. It took in more than $1.2 billion in 2023, funding a massive international network with thousands of employees, tens of thousands of volunteers, and operations in 100 countries.
 
But it started humbly. After Franklin Graham, son of the legendary evangelist Billy Graham, graduated from Appalachian State University, he went to work for a new organization founded by pastor Bob Pierce, as Business NC reported.
 
Pierce named the group after the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke chapter 10, about a man helping another lying on the side of the road as others passed him by: thus, “Samaritan’s Purse.”
 
Pierce passed away in 1978. Graham, then only in his late 20s, took over the organization. “I took office chairs and a few files from his [Pierce’s] desk in California to North Carolina, and we set up Samaritan’s Purse here in Boone with some ladies from the local church who helped me,” Graham told Business NC.
 
The group slowly but steadily expanded its footprint in the years that followed. In 1993, shortly after the Soviet Union collapsed, Graham says someone called from England asking if he’d help put Christmas gifts in shoeboxes and send them to children in eastern Europe. One of Graham’s friends, a pastor in Charlotte, worked with his congregation to help fulfill the request, and by Christmastime they’d put together 11,000 shoeboxes.
 
Thus began one of the organization’s most prolific international aid activities – Operation Christmas Child. Since that year, they’ve delivered shoeboxes with Christmas gifts to more than 232 million children in 170 countries.
 
As the Samaritan’s Purse budget has grown, so too has its repertoire of aid undertakings: sheltering refugees in Syria; providing medical care to conflict zones like the Ukraine; treating HIV and containing Ebola in Africa; providing food to displaced populations in South Sudan; rebuilding houses in tornado alley; and much more.
 
The organization embraces its Christian roots and mission. Franklin Graham said of the Christmas shoeboxes, for example: “These gifts open the door for us to share God’s love and the eternal hope of the Gospel with children and their families who are living in desperation and fear. The world is changing, but the message of the cross doesn’t change — bringing the hope of the Gospel to millions, especially the living hope of Jesus. Our mission never changes.”
 
But Samaritan’s Purse does not restrict its humanitarian aid to people of particular faiths, nor does the organization itself dabble heavily into politics – though Franklin Graham has not been shy about his support for and friendship with President Donald Trump.
 
The charity did, however, find itself close to political controversy recently, if one could call it that.

Given the organization’s international humanitarian portfolio, it receives some funding – about 5% of its revenue – from USAID, the federal agency targeted by the Department of Government Efficiency for a number of questionable expenditures.
 
Graham acknowledged the funding from USAID, saying, “These funds were used for emergency feeding programs in difficult areas of Africa including Sudan, South Sudan, DRC, and Ethiopia, with the majority being spent in Sudan and South Sudan.” Because the Trump administration exempted from any cuts or freezes USAID funding for “existing life-saving humanitarian assistance programs,” Samaritan’s Purse was not impacted.
 
As a function of real human impact, Samaritan’s Purse may well be the most prolific organization – for-profit or non-profit – in North Carolina. Thousands of North Carolinians have volunteered under the group’s banner.
 
And when the worst natural disaster in state history hit in its own backyard, Samaritan’s Purse was there to help pick up the pieces.