Emmanuel Mercy Mission was officially founded in August 1992 by Primary Founder Valery Shkurinsky and Co-Founder Vladimir K. Durshpek. Driven by gratitude after arriving in the United States as refugees, our first devoted volunteer, Valentina Ovcharenko, dedicated her private home to serve as our first operational sorting warehouse and administrative office. Inside her home, teams manually sorted, packed, and prepared our very first shipments of humanitarian aid.

To support their large families, brothers Valery and Nick Shkurinsky founded a for-profit company — completely separate from their charitable organization — and took out a commercial loan to purchase their first Freightliner truck. Working tirelessly, they did everything they could to help finance independent humanitarian shipments, which they sponsored and organized from other states to their main warehouse in Portland, Oregon, from where the containers were then shipped out. During this time, we established close partnerships with Medical Teams International (then Northwest Medical Teams), the Portland Rescue Mission, local grocery store chains, and local food banks to provide food and essential supplies to newly arrived immigrants and local families in need.

Thanks to strong ties with local communities and voluntary corporate sponsorship in the Pacific Northwest, our organization successfully coordinated the shipment of more than 250 containers throughout the 1990s. These shipments, filled with food, clothing, and essential medical supplies, were delivered directly to people, orphanages, and clinics in Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Armenia, the Baltic states, and other republics of the former Soviet Union.

During these years, our mission faced financial difficulties that limited our resources for large transoceanic shipments of emergency aid. Due to these difficulties, we temporarily suspended container shipments. Instead, we used this period to provide modest humanitarian aid whenever possible, within the limits of our core budget. During this hiatus, we planned new ways to resume our aid delivery channels in the future.

In 2016, Emmanuel Mercy Mission officially resumed its active operations. To meet current standards, we updated our nonprofit structures and renewed our landmark operational partnership with Medical Teams International. This enabled us to ship high-quality medical supplies directly from their warehouse to Ukraine, Belarus, and Burundi.

2016–2022 — Resumption of Humanitarian Aid Shipments

To expand our capacity to provide medical assistance, Emmanuel Mercy Mission has renewed its partnership with Medical Teams International. Thanks to the high level of transparency among our vetted and verified local partners, we have successfully shipped numerous 40-foot ocean containers to various sovereign states over the past several years: