Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC) (then the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children) is founded by Liv Ullmann, Catherine O’Neill, Susan Stark Alberti, and Susan Forbes Martin, with Mary Anne Schwalbe as the founding director. The Afghan Women’s Social Service Center, offering training and literacy programs to refugees in Pakistan, is founded following WRC’s first delegation to Pakistan, when Afghan women expressed a desperate need for such services.

WRC is the first US organization to call for an international ban on the use of landmines.

WRC coauthors Guidelines for Women’s Asylum Claims, a framework for analyzing and interpreting the claims of women asylum seekers.

WRC plays a critical role in developing guidelines released by the US Immigration and Naturalization Service to recognize rape, domestic abuse, and sexual violence against women as potential grounds for asylum.

Our report Liberty Denied draws attention to the special concerns of asylum-seeking women held in US detention centers and WRC calls for fundamental reforms to immigration detention.

WRC provides language to the new SPHERE Humanitarian Charter, which ensures that gender considerations are incorporated into all sectors of humanitarian response.

WRC co-sponsors, with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the first-ever Global Consultation with Refugee Women. Following the consultation, UNHCR released the “Five Commitments to Refugee Women.”

WRC conducts first research on Minimum Initial Services Package for reproductive health in crises, which outlines a set of lifesaving activities to be implemented at the onset of an emergency.

Masculinities: Male Roles and Male Involvement in the Promotion of Gender Equality informs and influences UNHCR’s age, gender, and diversity mainstreaming (AGDM) in all its work.

Locking Up Family Values: The Detention of Immigrant Families exposes the US government’s practice of detaining immigrant families and results in a significant reduction in the use of family detention.

Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children changes its name to Women’s Refugee Commission. Building Livelihoods: A Field Manual for Practitioners in Humanitarian Settings is a first-of-its-kind manual to guide humanitarian agencies in providing economic opportunities for refugees.

WRC publishes Preventing Gender-based Violence, Building Livelihoods: Guidance and Tools for Improved Programming, the first report on how to make economic programs safe for refugee women.

WRC gives voice to stateless women through our first-of-its-kind research documenting how statelessness undermines women and their families’ protection and their access to basic services.

WRC becomes a lead partner in the global “Call to Action on Prevention from Gender-Based Violence in Emergencies” and leads a process to develop a “Road Map” for 2016–2020.

WRC co-leads an advocacy effort that resulted in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reversing its proposal to separate families at the US-Mexico border to try to deter mothers and children from migrating and seeking asylum in the US.

WRC publishes a series of groundbreaking reports exploring sexual violence against men and boys, and the impact of male sexual victimization on women and girls.

WRC improved women’s health in northeast Nigeria, an area devastated by armed conflict, by working with community partners to deliver reproductive, maternal, newborn, child, and adolescent health and nutrition services while strengthening local health systems. Together we trained and deployed more than 200 community health workers and reached over 6,600 households, helping them to live healthier lives as they faced the challenges of living through conflict.

The Refugee Self-Reliance Initiative (RSRI), cofounded by WRC and RefugePoint, is an innovative, transformational approach to humanitarian aid that moves refugees away from traditional assistance and prioritizes self-reliance. The RSRI created a tool, called the Self-Reliance Index, that measures the impact of economic programs meant to encourage and support refugee self-reliance, to ensure that these programs are effective. In 2023, 41 humanitarian organizations used the Self-Reliance Index in 26 countries, a huge increase from prior years and a strong signal of its usefulness and success.