About CAFOD
It began with a meal that wasn't eaten.
In 1960, a group of Catholic women in England heard about families struggling with hunger on the Caribbean island of Dominica.
They wanted to help.
Their idea was remarkably simple.
On a Friday during Lent, families would eat one inexpensive meal instead of what they normally ate. Children could give up their sweets. Adults would sacrifice something too.
Then everyone would give away the money they had saved.
It became the first Family Fast Day.
The organizers expected a few hundred pounds.
More than £6,000 came in.
Behind that money was an idea that would eventually become CAFOD:
Someone else's suffering matters to us because they are our neighbor.
A Group of Women Started Something Much Larger
The women behind that first Fast Day included Jacquie Stuyt, Evelyn White, Nora Warmington, and Elspeth Orchard.
They weren't launching an enormous international humanitarian organization.
They were responding to a need.
The money helped support a mother-and-baby clinic in Dominica, but the project went further. Communities received help with water and learned how to grow vegetables so families could build greater security for themselves.
The response among Catholics in England and Wales kept growing.
Collections spread through dioceses.
Two years later, in 1962, the Bishops' Conference of England and Wales formally registered the Catholic Fund for Overseas Development.
CAFOD had arrived.
Don't Decide What People Need From Thousands of Miles Away
International aid can easily become a story about outsiders arriving to rescue people.
CAFOD deliberately tries to work differently.
Its approach begins with local knowledge.
When a community faces drought in Kenya, conflict in Sudan, displacement in the Middle East, or threats to Indigenous land in Latin America, the people living there understand realities that an organization headquartered in England cannot fully understand from a distance.
So CAFOD works through local experts, churches, grassroots organizations, and community leaders.
They listen.
They identify priorities.
They build solutions suited to their own circumstances.
CAFOD provides funding, technical support, connections, advocacy, and other resources that can help those locally rooted organizations do their work.
The community isn't treated as the project.
It's part of the leadership.
Be There When Everything Suddenly Changes
Sometimes long-term development has to give way to immediate survival.
An earthquake strikes.
War forces families from their homes.
Floodwater destroys crops.
Drought turns farmland barren.
Food becomes scarce.
CAFOD responds to humanitarian emergencies through local partners and the enormous international Catholic network of which it is part.
That network can be especially important in difficult places.
A local church may already have clergy, religious communities, volunteers, schools, health facilities, or community relationships in areas that outside organizations struggle to reach.
When disaster comes, those relationships don't have to be invented overnight.
People are already there.
CAFOD can help strengthen their response.
Stay After the Emergency Cameras Leave
Emergency relief saves lives.
It doesn't rebuild an entire future.
Once the immediate crisis begins fading from international attention, families may still need livelihoods restored, farms replanted, water systems repaired, homes rebuilt, and communities prepared for whatever comes next.
That is where CAFOD's development work becomes especially important.
Farmers can learn methods that make crops more resilient to changing weather.
Communities can improve access to water.
Women can develop businesses and livelihoods.
Local organizations can strengthen disaster preparedness.
Peacebuilding initiatives can help communities fractured by violence.
Human-rights defenders can receive support as they protect people, land, and resources.
CAFOD isn't only interested in helping someone survive this week.
It wants communities to become more resilient for the years ahead.
Poverty Isn't Only About Money
A family may be poor because their crops failed.
But another layer may sit underneath that problem.
Changing rainfall.
Unfair access to land.
Political corruption.
Conflict.
Discrimination.
An economic system that leaves small farmers vulnerable.
CAFOD therefore combines humanitarian and development work with advocacy.
It campaigns around issues that contribute to poverty and injustice, including debt, climate change, food systems, corporate practices, and decisions made by governments and international institutions.
That can make its work look different from a charity focused entirely on direct aid.
CAFOD wants to help the person harmed by an unjust system.
It also wants to ask why the system keeps producing the harm.
Care for People and Care for Creation Belong Together
Environmental concerns occupy a major place in CAFOD's current vision.
That isn't treated as separate from poverty.
A farmer depends upon soil and rainfall.
A fishing family depends upon healthy waters.
A community facing repeated floods experiences environmental change through damaged homes, lost income, hunger, and displacement.
Drawing heavily from Catholic teaching and Laudato Si', CAFOD describes the suffering of the earth and the suffering of people experiencing poverty as interconnected.
Its strategic vision is called Our Common Home.
That means development should not improve someone's life today by destroying the environment their children will depend upon tomorrow.
Human flourishing and creation care belong in the same conversation.
Catholic Identity Shapes the Work
CAFOD is unmistakably Catholic.
Its understanding of development grows from the Gospel and Catholic Social Teaching.
Every human being possesses inherent dignity.
People should be able to participate in decisions affecting their lives.
Society has responsibilities toward people who are poor and excluded.
Creation is something humanity is entrusted to care for.
The common good matters.
Solidarity means another person's suffering cannot simply be dismissed because they live on the other side of the world.
Yet CAFOD does not restrict assistance to Catholics.
Its humanitarian and development work serves people of different religions and people with no religious faith.
Need—not religious identity—determines whom it seeks to help.
Give Catholics in England and Wales a Way to Participate
CAFOD's overseas work is only half of the relationship.
The other side happens in parishes, schools, homes, and communities across England and Wales.
Catholics pray.
Children learn about global poverty in school.
Parishes participate in Family Fast Days.
Volunteers organize events.
Supporters raise money.
Campaigners write to political leaders.
People alter choices in their own lives after thinking more deeply about poverty and creation.
This means CAFOD isn't simply transferring donations from Britain to another country.
It's trying to cultivate solidarity.
The person giving and the person receiving aid are not meant to remain strangers separated by thousands of miles.
Both belong to one human family.
More Than Sixty Years Later, the Fast Continues
The first women behind CAFOD didn't describe what they were doing as extraordinary.
They saw people suffering and believed Christians should respond.
That instinct still sits underneath a much larger organization.
Today there are professional humanitarian programs, international partnerships, climate strategies, advocacy campaigns, safeguarding systems, development specialists, and a global Catholic aid network.
The machinery became considerably more sophisticated.
The original idea remained surprisingly simple.
Someone is hungry.
Someone's home has been destroyed.
Someone's rights are being ignored.
Someone's family is trapped in poverty.
Someone's community is trying to build a better future.
Faith asks what love of neighbor requires.
Then it does something.
At the heart of CAFOD is the Catholic conviction that every person possesses God-given dignity and that faith must become solidarity with people experiencing poverty, conflict, injustice, and environmental crisis. What began when Catholic women sacrificed a meal to help families in Dominica has grown into a global ministry of emergency relief, sustainable development, livelihoods, peacebuilding, human-rights advocacy, climate action, education, prayer, and campaigning. CAFOD does not simply ask how much aid can be delivered. It asks how local communities can shape their own future—and how Christians can stand beside them while they do it.
