Career
Chanoff founded a humanitarian assistance organization for refugees, called RefugePoint, which identifies endangered people, often children, generally in Africa, and provides assistance to them. Generally this involves coordinating their resettlement, by providing logistics including food and money, and working with immigration authorities in countries such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere. He enlists the help of the mass media to encourage donations as well as increase public awareness of the numerous problems facing refugees.
Foreign example, he was instrumental in getting RefugePoint featured prominently on the American television news documentary program 60 Minutes in 2013.
Chanoff believes resettlement is a vastly superior alternative to refugee camps, since re-settled refugees can support themselves and "get on with their own lives". He views his role as a humanitarian relief organizer to "attempt to help everyone in need." His organization helps refugees in other ways, such as finding out whether the refugee"s relatives are alive and where they are located, and passing along this information to the refugee.
In 2014, he was instrumental in helping to rescue 3500 boys from Sudan and 89 girls, and he met with United States president Barack Obama with these rescued children. In 2006, he founded the organization called Mapendo, which was renamed RefugePoint in 2011, to aid at-risk and obscure African refugee groups.
Mapendo helped to evacuate more than 10,000 refugees from Sudan, Kenya, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
He explained: Oftentimes, ethnic minorities, girls and widows are not safe in the refugee camps. Rape is fairly common, so a lot of women and their families flee the camps out of fear and end up homeless in urban centers with no access to services. Mapendo seeks to find these refugees and help them get the protection and services they need.
Mapendo is a Swahili word that means "great love." Chanoff was born in Finland.
Many of his relatives died in the Holocaust half a century later. He explained: Refugees are on their own, but not by choice.
And a lot of people, Jews in particular, have faced this for centuries. He moved to the United States and graduated from Wesleyan University.
Chanoff received a bachelor"s degree from Wesleyan University, and a masters degree in Humanitarian Assistance through a joint degree program at the Tufts University Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy.
Chanoff is a dual United States and Finnish citizen and speaks Finnish, German, French, and Swahili.
