This past year was, without question, the biggest year in Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service’s 84-year history. As you’ll see in these pages, not only did we grow our staff to an unprecedented team of over 600 people, we launched three major initiatives and massively expanded programming to serve more children and families than ever before.

At the same time, global displacement and need have also been increasing at an incredible rate. To meet that need, stay true to our mission, and build on the momentum of our growth, we began to discern whether a rebrand would help us build a bigger table of supporters and allow us to welcome even more people. Our research determined that it would—and after an intensive, thoughtful process, we landed on Global Refuge as a name that would allow us to honor our special Lutheran legacy and enter our next 85 years with a renewed focus on the people we serve.

One of the core values we wanted to emphasize was that of grace, a central tenet of Lutheranism with significance for people of all faith and moral traditions. And that’s when it hit us—GRACE: Global Refuge for Advocacy, Care, and Empowerment.

A thread of GRACE runs through everything we do, from our efforts to mobilize communities and congregations to welcome, to our distinctive continuum of care for unaccompanied children, to our innovative refugee and immigrant mental health services. Our entire organization is grounded in human dignity and the provision of grace to those who have been forced to flee their homes—but we don’t stop there. We believe we must advocate alongside our new neighbors for systems and policies that support safety and opportunity, to care for individuals and families as people, not simply statistics, and to support the empowerment of immigrants and refugees regardless of where they are in their journeys.

We’re so proud of what we’ve accomplished and excited for what’s ahead—and we know that we can’t do it without you. We hope you enjoy following the thread of GRACE through the programs and stories shared in this report, and we look forward to an even bigger 2024!