Michelle Nunn, President and CEO of CARE, was a guest on The Curiosity Desk at GBH News in Boston, a show hosted by Edgar B. Herwick III. The first part of the May 4th episode is dedicated to the the history of the CARE PACKAGE as CARE celebrates 80 years of operations this May. Below are a few soundbites shared by Michelle Nunn during the course of the interview.
“It all goes back to a group of Americans who said we are not going to stand on the sidelines in post WWII Europe and watch people on the brink of starvation, and within literally a few months they figured out how to get 15 CARE packages. Those packages went from Philly to Le Havre France, and that was the beginning of a movement that over 20 years enabled over a 100 million CARE Packages to be delivered and now it has turned into an organization that just last year has served over 60 million people in 100+ countries.”
“It was actually designed by one of our colleagues in India who was leading our humanitarian response and who said, you know, when people are displaced after a natural disaster what we see is that they have to go from this place to get a blanket and to that place to get a tarp. Maybe they will also pick up a water filtration but you can imagine, it is not easy to carry all of this. So we started working together with him and a design center in India and said, what if we could put together a backpack that is something a woman could carry with herb baby on the front, if that was the case. It has 38 different interventions in it. It has everything from a tarp, for shelter, to water filtration system to solar battery lamps, for instance, so kids can do their homework and plug in their cell phones to be connected to their families and the world.”
You can hear the entire segment here.