This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Mennonite Central Committee traces its founding to a famine, not to an institution built in advance to prevent one. In late July 1920, representatives of several Mennonite Relief Commissions met at Prairie Street Mennonite Church in Elkhart, Indiana, and formed a provisional committee to answer reports of famine among Mennonite communities in southern Russia, territory that is now Ukraine, where the chaos following the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War had left people starving. The provisional body held its first official meeting two months later, on 27 September 1920, in Chicago, and the organization it created went on to formalize its structure, incorporating in Pennsylvania in 1937.
What began as a single-purpose famine response has run continuously for more than a century since, headquartered today in Akron, Pennsylvania, and sponsored in the United States by Mennonite, Brethren in Christ and Amish church bodies. Its stated purpose, sharing God's love and compassion for all in the name of Christ by responding to basic human needs and working for peace and justice, has stayed broadly the same even as the geography of its work expanded from one famine-stricken region to relief, development and peace programs carried out in dozens of countries worldwide.