As you have probably heard in the news over the past month or so, the Trump administration has frozen foreign aid programs and essentially dismantled USAID, which is the federal government’s overseas humanitarian relief agency. These decisions have had an enormous impact on the work of both faith-based and secular nonprofit organizations doing humanitarian work, including Catholic ones.

Our guest today, Bill O’Keefe, is one of the top executives at Catholic Relief Services, which is the official overseas humanitarian agency of the American Catholic community. Since their founding over 80 years ago, CRS has grown to serve communities in poverty in more 100 countries around the world.

Bill has served at CRS for 38 years, and today he is the agency’s Executive Vice President for Mission, Mobilization and Advocacy. In addition to advocating on in Washington, DC, for robust U.S. foreign aid funding, Bill mobilizes CRS' supporters across the country in a shared mission to support the world's most vulnerable people. There is probably no single person in the country who knows as much as Bill does about how the gutting of the US government’s foreign aid programs will affect the US Church’s ability to help people across the globe.

Host Mike Jordan Laskey found it so informative and helpful to talk to Bill. But it was also incredibly upsetting. People will die because of these decisions. The US Catholic Church’s immense humanitarian network is being hollowed out. It’s hard to know what we US Catholics can do in response. Bill hasn’t given up hope, though, and he and his team are working hard to figure out how to keep doing their essential, life-saving work around the world. He also shared some practical ways we can all pitch in to help support the mission.

Bill O'Keefe: https://www.crs.org/about/leadership/bill-o%E2%80%99keefe

Tell Congress to urge the administration to reverse terminations of life-saving aid, disperse funding: https://support.crs.org/act/foreign-aid-operations?ms=mamcrs0225app00fea00

CRS Rice Bowl: https://www.crsricebowl.org/

AMDG is a production of the Jesuit Media Lab, which is a project of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States.

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