ATLANTA — CARE USA President and CEO Michelle Nunn will address the Buckhead Business Association (BBA) during the organization’s Oct. 6 breakfast meeting.
CARE (Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere) was founded in 1945 when 22 American organizations joined together to send CARE Packages containing food and supplies to families in Europe after World War II. The first 15,000 packages reached the port of Le Havre, France, on May 11, 1946, and this year, the organization is celebrating its 70th anniversary and the CARE Package.
“The original CARE Package was really born out of the generosity and compassion of Americans after World War II,” Fox News quoted Nunn as saying. “They saw an enormous amount of suffering — millions of people who were refugees and who were hungry. And many of them were our former enemies — Germans that we had been fighting just literally months or years before.”
A poll commission commissioned by CARE found that 84 percent of Americans have heard of the term “care package” and 60 percent have either sent or received one. However, just 13 percent know where the phrase originated.
“We believe it’s important to reflect on the roots of the phrase and that unique chapter in American generosity that began in the aftermath of World War II, because the world once again is beset by massive humanitarian crises, from conflict in Syria and Yemen to hunger in Ethiopia, Somalia and southern Africa,” Nunn said in a recent news release.
Nunn, the daughter of former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., served CEO of Points of Light from 2007 to 2013 and joined CARE as its president and CEO in July 2015. In 2014, she ran for U.S. Senate; U.S. Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., ultimately won the seat.
The BBA holds breakfast meetings at 7:30 a.m. most Thursday mornings at the City Club of Buckhead. Meetings feature a business, political or civic leader as a speaker, and topics usually include leading issues within the Buckhead community and Atlanta as a whole. Tickets for members are $10 in advance and $12 at the door; non-member tickets are $20.
To learn more about CARE, visit care.org. For more information, visit buckheadbusiness.org.
