Founded to Aid Refugees Fleeing Nazi Germany

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 Unitarian Universalist Service Committee traces its founding to spring 1940, when the Unitarian minister Waitstill Sharp and his wife Martha Sharp organized the original Unitarian Service Committee to aid refugees fleeing Nazi occupied Europe, working alongside the Unitarian minister Charles Joy and Robert Dexter, the organization's founding director. The Sharps had already spent months in Prague and Paris helping refugees escape before the formal committee took shape back in the United States, work that put the new organization's founders in direct, personal contact with the crisis it was built to answer rather than organizing the effort from a distance.

William Emerson, former dean of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's School of Architecture, chaired the original board, giving the young refugee aid organization an institutional footing beyond its founders' own direct rescue work in Europe. The organization later merged with a parallel Universalist service body following the 1961 union of the Unitarian and Universalist denominations, becoming the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee under the name it carries today, continuing the refugee and humanitarian mission the Sharps had begun two decades earlier under very different historical circumstances.