Samaritan's Purse

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Samaritan's Purse was founded in 1970 by Bob Pierce, the same Baptist pastor and evangelist whose earlier relief work in postwar Korea had already produced World Vision two decades before. Pierce had already left World Vision's own leadership by the time he established the new organization in Hollywood, California, under a name drawn from the New Testament Parable of the Good Samaritan, as a smaller and more direct vehicle for the kind of urgent, hands-on relief work that had defined his earliest missionary trips. He would not live to see the scale it eventually reached: Pierce died in 1978, and leadership passed the following year to Franklin Graham, son of the evangelist Billy Graham, who moved the organization's headquarters to Boone, North Carolina in 1980 and has led it ever since.

Under Graham, Samaritan's Purse built an operational profile distinct from the federated model World Vision had grown into: rather than a network of interdependent national offices, it runs centrally from its Boone, North Carolina headquarters, operates its own DC-8 disaster response aircraft and deployable field hospitals, and describes its relief work explicitly as an expression of Christian missionary calling rather than framing the two as separate. It is also, through its Operation Christmas Child shoebox gift program, one of the most publicly recognizable Christian charities in the United States, a visibility built on a program far smaller in dollar terms than its disaster response work.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Samaritan's Purse's most recent audited accounts report total revenue of 1,839,497,527 US dollars against total expenses of 1,093,195,701 US dollars for the year ended 31 December 2024, with contributions making up 96 percent of revenue, figures that place it financially in the same range as World Vision's own founding office while the two organizations operate on almost opposite structural models. Where World Vision spreads its work across roughly 100 interdependent national offices, Samaritan's Purse concentrates operational control in one headquarters, owning and deploying its own disaster response aircraft and field hospitals rather than coordinating through a network of locally incorporated affiliates.

That centralized model has a direct practical consequence: an organization that owns its own DC-8 and can stand up a field hospital without waiting on a national office to mobilize can move into a disaster zone on a timeline a federated structure cannot always match, at the cost of the local rootedness a network of national offices provides in places it has operated for years. The revenue figure describes the resources behind that capability; the aircraft and field hospitals describe what the money is built to do differently from its federated peers.