Independent Refuge International began with a question asked in an eighth-grade history classroom. Studying the Holocaust, our founder, Ellie Moise, learned that only a small fraction of people actively carried out its atrocities — the overwhelming majority simply looked away, ordinary people who had decided that someone else’s suffering was not their responsibility. The lesson landed differently for her than for her classmates. Her own great-grandfather had escaped a work camp in Transnistria in 1941 and survived only because strangers chose to hide him rather than turn him away. She owed her very existence to people who refused to be bystanders. That same night, watching families flee the war in Ukraine on the evening news, she recognized the same question being asked again in her own century: what kind of person was she going to be?

Ellie was thirteen when she decided the war would be more than a headline.

This is the conviction Independent Refuge is built on: that no one’s suffering is someone else’s problem, and that ordinary people, acting with intention, can change the entire trajectory of a life. We exist to help displaced women escape high-risk homelands and find safe harbor — pairing each of them with housing, careers, savings, and a caring community as they rebuild. Every woman we resettle is proof of an idea a teenager carried out of a history lesson and refused to set down: that the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference — and that choosing not to look away is a decision any of us can make. We are still answering that question. We invite you to answer it alongside us.