A century of history
Our worldwide campaign against poverty and exclusion goes back nearly hundred years. Our history begins with the First World War in Europe.
In 1914, many Belgians fled the horrors of occupation, and a number of Dutch Catholics, struck by their plight, offered them relief. Little did they know that their concern and effort would be the start of a century of compassion and struggle for justice.
It has been a long road from the Dutch Roman-Catholic Housing Commission in 1914 to Cordaid, the Catholic Organisation for Relief and Development Aid, in 2011. But the essence has remained: we still believe that the world can change for the better. And we keep making that change happen.
The initiative in 1914 quickly grew into the foundation of the foundation Caritas Neerlandica. Its goal was to offer emergency aid in the wake of disasters, and to put the age-old ideal of caritas into practice. Soon its working sphere had expanded to “the poor countries in the Third World.”
Caritas Neerlandica became Mensen in Nood (People in Need). At the same time, Memisa emerged, a charity dedicated to improving health care in the Third World.
In the nineteen sixties, caritas as we knew it from 1914 was incorporated into the concept of development cooperation. It is not only direct aid to people in need that is required, but the change of the structures underlying the causes of injustice and poverty. Within the worldwide Catholic church, this led to the foundation of Vastenaktie (Lent campaign) organisations, which had (and still have) the higher goal of promoting awareness of the global poverty problem.
