This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The American Friends Service Committee was established on 30 April 1917, when seventeen members of the Religious Society of Friends met just days after the United States entered the First World War. Their original purpose was specific and urgent: to give conscientious objectors a constructive alternative to military service, work consistent with the Quaker peace testimony rather than a refusal offered with nothing put in its place. AFSC incorporated in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and has been headquartered in Philadelphia ever since, engaging in religious, charitable, social, philanthropic and relief work carried out on behalf of participating yearly meetings and other bodies of the Religious Society of Friends.
Thirty years after its founding, that wartime relief work received the world's most visible recognition. In 1947, AFSC and its British counterpart, the Friends Service Council, now known as Quaker Peace and Social Witness, jointly received the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded on behalf of Quakers worldwide rather than to either organization alone. The Internal Revenue Service has since determined AFSC to be an association of churches, exempt from federal income taxes, and the organization now divides its programs across eight geographic regions, each running work on peace, immigrant rights, restorative justice, economic justice and climate justice, a structure considerably larger than the seventeen founders who met in 1917 could have built alone.