Redeem’s founder, Jesse Rudy, joined International Justice Mission back in 2009 as Director of IJM’s field office in Kampala Uganda. When he got off the plane in Entebbe, he knew almost nothing about Uganda and even less about the abuse of widows and orphans struggling to hold onto their homes, their land and their livelihoods. On his first day on the ground, his new team of Uganda professionals walked him through story after story of clients who had been attacked with machetes, beaten with bricks and threatened with the murder of their children, all because their attackers wanted to take their most valuable earthly possession for themselves. They also walked him through story after story of victims who had lost the fight against their attackers and were left homeless, reduced to living like animals in the wild and watching their children die of disease, exposure and starvation.

Over the next five years, Jesse worked with that team to develop an intervention model that would leverage the authority of local law enforcement to create safety and security for these incredibly strong and resilient women and children. He worked with investigator Claver Byamugisha to develop a partnership with the Ugandan Police force that resulted in the arrest of scores of the predators who were preying on the vulnerabilities of widows and orphans. He worked with attorney Juliet Musoke to strengthen the response of the Ugandan Prosecutor’s office and achieve some of the country’s first convictions for the violent abuse and exploitation of widows and orphans. He worked with social worker Eva Kadi to walk alongside the team’s clients, ensuring that they had the love and support that they needed to navigate the justice system and prosper in their newfound safety. And he worked with dozens of other committed Ugandan professionals who backed up their faith in Christ with self-sacrificial action on behalf of those who couldn’t protect themselves.

In 2014, Jesse left Uganda to lead IJM’s programs in the Philippines, but his team continued to fight for the rights of Central Uganda’s widows and orphans. As the team piled up rescue after rescue, arrest after arrest and conviction after conviction, they began to see transformation that extended well beyond the lives of their clients. By 2017, when the pilot project in Central Uganda officially ended, they found that they had not only brought rescue to over 1000 women and children and criminal accountability to nearly 100 of their attackers, but they had also radically changed criminal behavior in the project area. In the decade before the project began, the odds of a widow being stripped of her home were nearly one in three. By the time, the project ended those odds had dropped to less than one in twenty, meaning that thousands and thousands of women and children who otherwise would have been victims were living safely in their homes.

At about the same time that the time that the team was completing the pilot project in Central Uganda, Jesse was working with IJM’s global leadership team to develop the strategy to achieve its vision of catalyzing a global revolution of partner organizations capable of rescuing millions and protecting half a billion of the world’s poor. In those discussions, the question of what to do with the Central Ugandan model arose. IJM’s research told it that widows and orphans were uniquely vulnerable to violent abuse and exploitation, and its experience told it that the model developed in Central Uganda was transformative at both an individual and societal level. At the same time, its experience demonstrated that the model was unique among IJM’s intervention models and required a great deal of specialization to execute at the highest level. In considering all of this, it became increasingly clear to Jesse and to IJM’s other leaders that the best way to protect the world’s most vulnerable widows and orphans (and the best way for IJM to develop its capacity to work with partner organizations) was to create a separate organization that could focus all of its energies on developing and scaling the Central Ugandan model. And so, with the blessing, support and partnership of IJM’s leadership, Jesse stepped out of his role as IJM’s Chief Financial Officer to launch Redeem International in February 2020.

Redeem’s vision is to take the model of rescue and transformation that Jesse and his team developed in Central Uganda, and to replicate it across Uganda, across Africa and ultimately across the developing world. At Redeem, we know from over a decade of on the ground successes and failures that law enforcement leads to deterrence, deterrence leads to safety and safety leads to prosperity. Accordingly, we are committed to engaging in the hard work of supporting local law enforcement authorities through collaborative casework. Through one case, we will bring redemption to an individual widow and her family, changing their lives forever. Through a critical mass of cases, coupled with casework-informed law enforcement capacity building efforts, we will create deterrence that protects all of the widows and orphans in a community - thousands of women and children who we will never know, because we will never rescue them, because they won’t need to be rescued, because they will never be abused in the first place.