Our Mission Statement

Social Promise supports critical health and educational resources serving impoverished Ugandan communities. By promoting awareness, we seek to empower other people and institutions to support these vital humanitarian efforts. Conveying the achievement and promise inherent in these efforts, we hope to inspire a community dedicated to a spirit of altruism.

Our Beginnings

Sharon McGee Crary, one of our founding directors, had the opportunity to travel to Uganda in 2000, when she worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While there, she was stationed at Lacor Hospital in Gulu to help with diagnosing cases of Ebola hemorrhagic fever during a horrible outbreak of the virus that occurred in northern Uganda. In the afternoons, while her lab experiments would run, she spent time with the children at a local orphanage called St. Jude Children’s Home.

During this first visit, Sharon fell in love with the beauty of the land and people of Uganda. The serene beauty and apparent calm, however, contrasted starkly with the desperate needs of people who had been living at the mercy of a rebel group for over twenty years. The atrocities committed by this group were highlighted by advocacy groups such as Invisible Children and Doctors Without Borders, which named northern Uganda as one of the Top 10 Most Underreported Humanitarian Stories of 2004 with the headline “Intense Grief and Fear in Northern Uganda”.

Through her work with the international team responding to the Ebola outbreak, Sharon came to realize how important it was to people who were dealing with an atrocious situation to know that people around the world had heard of their grief – and cared.

They wanted to know we cared that people lived in fear of violent raids to the extent that children walked miles every night to sleep with thousands of other children in the safe, fenced space within the grounds of Lacor Hospital.

They wanted to know we cared that the rebel activity had so devastated the economy of the area that people were living in such extreme poverty that on any given day they were as likely to die as to live.

So when she returned to the United States, Sharon recruited her family and friends to support the neediest people in northern Uganda. For the first few years, we were able to support the children at St. Jude Children’s Home without incorporating a formal nonprofit, but we found that to implement all the ideas we have and to give people in the U.S. the maximum flexibility in how they support the people in Uganda, we needed to start our own nonprofit. So we incorporated Social Promise in 2011 and soon thereafter received our approval from the IRS to operate as a charity with 501(c)(3) status.

We know that there are people and places in need all over the world. And we welcome others to help wherever they feel called to do so – because of proximity, through personal connection, or as a result of historical or family ties.

At Social Promise, we have chosen to help the vulnerable people of northern Uganda because we met them, they asked for our help, and we knew we could respond.