Our story starts back in 2006, during the Iraq War when Jeremy and Jessica Courtney began traveling to Iraq to join the humanitarian response.
After ultimately moving to Iraq, Jeremy met a little girl who was suffering from a life-threatening heart defect. Our team would soon learn that tens of thousands of children across Iraq were suffering from these life-threatening birth defects, the suspected result of Saddam Hussein’s chemical attacks against his own people, American weapons like depleted uranium and white phosphorus, and other factors.
Jeremy and Jessica took the $5,000 they had to their name and started an online store, Buy Shoes. Save Lives., selling handmade shoes from the Kurds in northern Iraq to the American market. 100% of the proceeds went to fund lifesaving heart surgeries for children.
This innovative cultural and humanitarian initiative at such a fraught time in the American war effort attracted media attention in both Iraq and the United States. And so our work grew.
As more and more people wanted to help, Jeremy and Jessica decided to start a separate nonprofit called Preemptive Love, believing more people would help through charitable giving than they could marshal through the sale of specialty shoes and shirts alone.
This second organization would go on to help thousands of Iraqi children by bringing in world-class medical teams from around the world to train Iraqi doctors and nurses and build up Iraqi hospitals in the aftermath of years of dictatorship, sanctions, and war. The doctors and nurses we trained through this program have gone on to provide thousands of lifesaving surgeries to children across Iraq that could not have otherwise been provided.
But in 2013, with a medical team en route to the city of Fallujah, ISIS terrorists staged an attack that would change the trajectory of our lives forever, killing the mayor of Fallujah. This effectively marked the beginning of the rise of ISIS.
In the summer of 2014, ISIS took over the city of Mosul, displacing millions, and committing genocide. As caravans of ISIS fighters marauded their way toward our city, overwhelming everything in their path, our team decided to pivot from pediatric heart surgeries to address the immediate needs of our displaced and besieged neighbors.
Ihsan Ibraheem joined the team when the fight to free Fallujah from the grip of ISIS ramped up. Ihsan made global headlines when the aid convoy he was helping lead was trapped in the desert between ISIS fighters and US airstrikes against those ISIS fighters. With half of his team trying to bury themselves in the desert sand to avoid detection by ISIS, and the other half targeted by US fighter jets as suspected terrorists, Ihsan and his team barely survived the night. Ihsan has gone on to help lead countless aid missions with staff and partners from Fallujah to Mosul as the fight to liberate the country from ISIS continued.
Inas Basim joined the team a few years after being injured in a bus bombing in Baghdad forcing her to flee her childhood home. Inas would go on to lead local women’s empowerment initiatives for displaced Iraqi women like her and Syrian refugees.
Inas’s refusal to let someone else’s violence determine who she becomes is an immediate source of light and hope to everyone she meets.
We met Rawand Rasul while he was working with the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement. This was not his first war. As a child, Saddam Hussein’s genocidal attacks against the Kurds forced him to flee to Iran, where he lived for a time. After Saddam was pushed out, his family would return home, but the experience of being targeted for extermination would mark him for life.
Seeing Rawand in the aftermath of the ISIS takeover serving some of the same displaced Arab communities who would have participated in the attacks against his people 25 years earlier, we knew he was special.
For a decade, we had worked with the First Lady, Vice President, Speaker of Parliament, Prime Minister, top generals, militia groups, religious clerics, and nearly every major governor or health director in Iraq. We had gone places no one else was willing to go, verifiably saving the lives of thousands of children, and garnering international recognition. For several reasons, it was time to give more.
We provided the majority of the philanthropic venture capital to start a new heart surgery organization with our medical partners so we could expand the work we were doing in Iraq to places like Libya, Ukraine, and Iran.
And by 2016, the civil war in Syria was reaching its peak and we were feeling drawn in by the stories of friends like Zido Khalaf, a displaced Yezidi whose cousins and neighbors had been kidnapped by ISIS and taken into Syria.
As the Assad government attacked the city of Aleppo, a friend and partner introduced us to Michel Tannous, a Lebanese citizen who was eager to help prevent the further demise of the growing Syrian refugee crisis.
Michel has gone on to manage our nationwide efforts in and around Aleppo, Deir Ezzor, Raqqa, Idlib, and Damascus. As millions of people continued to be displaced across Syria and chemical weapons attacks continued, Michel and his team of local staff and partners have served up tens of millions of meals, provided a million medical consultations, and overseen hundreds of rebuilds.
When a massive explosion at the Port of Beirut damaged and displaced much of the city, Michel was there, too, among the first on the ground to lead a massive, coordinated food and recovery response.
As the civil war in Syria crossed its peak and the war against ISIS in Iraq was coming to an end, we shifted a large proportion of our work toward employment solutions that would allow refugees to work, on the run, with nothing but a smartphone.
With support from the U.N.’s World Food Programme, Jessica started a new business unit called WorkWell, where we helped lead some of the early humanitarian field applications of machine learning and AI.
Over the coming years, we would expand to Lebanon and Mexico, earning millions of dollars in funding from the U.N., the German and American governments, and private commercial contracts, building a highly successful employment program that helped lift some of the most vulnerable people on the planet.
Still, as we approached our 15th anniversary, something new was brewing in the hearts of our Middle East leadership team. For all the good we had accomplished, some of the old structures and old ideas had failed. So to preserve the good, the beautiful, and the truth of our work together spanning three calendar decades, our Middle East leadership team came together to spin off something new.
HUMANITE Peace Collective was officially established in the winter of 2022 on the heart and soul of a team of founders whose professional work and legacy together goes back to 2006.
In February 2022, Russia began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in an explicit effort to annex the entire country back into the Russian fold. As some 18 million people were displaced, HUMANITE’s team of refugees and war survivors immediately desired to respond.
In August, Ted Haddock, a member of HUMANITE’s Board of Directors, helped bring The National Ballet of Ukraine to Orlando, FL to raise money for frontline relief and recovery, drawing us all in further to the Ukrainian community.
After raising $1M for Ukraine at the one-night event, HUMANITE partnered with The Ginsburg Family Foundation, The Edward E. Haddock, Jr. Family Foundation, and the First Lady of Ukraine Olena Zelenska to tour The National Ballet of Ukraine across North America to raise funds for frontline relief and recovery.
When demonstrations against the clerical regime broke out in Iran after Mahsa Amini was killed in Iran for “improperly wearing her headscarf”, HUMANITE cofounder Rawand Rasul led our organization back into Iran and into the community and country that had once hosted him as a child refugee fleeing dictatorship to help serve the people of Iran in their time of need. In partnership with local doctors, nurses, and activists, “HUMANITE has been critical with access, supplies, doctors, & nurses to protect demonstrators across Iran," according to the Hengaw Organization for Human Rights.
When a massive earthquake struck Turkey and northern Syria on the morning of February 6, 2023, HUMANITE was on the ground responding within minutes. Over the coming weeks, as international aid organizations who had long since pulled out of Syria sat at the border trying to get aid back in, HUMANITE provided food, water, and shelter to thousands of Syrian families in need.
In the run-up to the outbreak of civil war in Sudan, HUMANITE was invited to meet with the top Sudanese stakeholders from the military, RSF, and civilian bodies. For nearly a year before the full-fledged eruption, we worked with various stakeholders to try and broker some modicum of goodwill or humanitarian cooperation between the increasingly belligerent parties. But our efforts and every other effort eventually failed and our dear friends and partners in Sudan eventually fled for their lives as the country descended into widespread killing and chaos.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas launched a terror attack against innocent civilians across southern Israel, kidnapping 240 people, killing ~1,000, and injuring thousands more. In response, Israel launched retaliatory attacks killing thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians in Gaza and injuring tens of thousands more. Both sides were accused of war crimes.
For months leading up to the attacks, HUMANITE Peace Collective had been recruiting new members and colleagues across southern Israel and Gaza. Within 24 hours of the initial attack, HUMANITE was coordinating peer-to-peer evacuations inside Gaza and working to prepare the distribution of food and water for nearly 1M displaced people.
Up north, on the Israel-Lebanon border, Israel and Hezbollah exchanged fire, placing thousands of innocent civilians in the crossfire. HUMANITE got to work immediately, surveying the threat across southern Lebanon and preparing to evacuate and supply those in need.
For ~20 years, our team has been building global organizations, national networks, and local chapters for peace. We’ve succeeded. We’ve failed. And we’ve grown through it all.
Today, more than $1B in economic uplift across 10+ countries originates from donors like you who have entrusted us with $100M to multiply peace around the world.
We couldn’t do this without you.
And we wouldn’t want to.
