On Friday, Oct. 16, CEO Anwar Khan will join Islamic Relief USA staff and volunteers who are assisting with flood relief efforts in Columbia, S.C.
All week, Islamic Relief USA has been conducting damage assessments with the American Red Cross and FEMA, clearing the way for families to qualify for additional assistance. The team has completed about 2,500 assessments in the Columbia area, and staff expect to begin casework for families.
“As I walked the streets trying my best to access the magnitude of the flood waters that hit that town, a person came out of their [home], just thanking me for being there,” one volunteer said.
Khan will visit Columbia and surrounding areas on Friday to survey the damage and recovery efforts.
A combination of weather factors including indirect impact from Hurricane Joaquim caused record amounts of rain in the first week of October. “The flooding is unprecedented and historical,” Dr. Marshall Shepherd, a meteorologist and director of the atmospheric sciences program at the University of Georgia was quoted saying. President Barack Obama signed a disaster declaration for the state of South Carolina, ordering federal aid to supplement state, tribal and local recovery efforts.
Islamic Relief USA has worked with the American Red Cross in numerous previous disaster relief efforts across the United States. In 2014, Islamic Relief USA signed a national Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the American Red Cross, the first formal partnership of its kind between the Red Cross and a Muslim response organization in the United States. Since its inception in 2011, IRUSA’s Disaster Response Team has been deployed to two dozen major disaster situations in the United States and has trained and certified more than 2,500 disaster responders throughout the United States.
Media Contact: media@irusa.org or 703-370-7202
On site: William Derrick Lea, Disaster Relief Manager, 202-212-9412 (cell)
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Islamic Relief USA, based in Alexandria, Va., is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) humanitarian organization. Its mission is to alleviate suffering, hunger, illiteracy and disease regardless of color, race, gender or creed, and to provide aid in a compassionate and dignified manner. Islamic Relief USA aims to provide rapid relief in the event of human and natural disasters and to establish sustainable local development projects, allowing communities to better help themselves. Its programs benefit millions of people each year around the world, including in the United States.
Islamic Relief USA meets all of the Standards for Charity Accountability of the BBB Wise Giving Alliance, a national charity monitoring group affiliated with the Better Business Bureau system. Islamic Relief USA is on the U.S. government’s Combined Federal Campaign (CFC) charity list, and it is also a signatory to the code of conduct of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.