Co-founding of the Swiss Relief Fund for Starving Children

In December 1914, shortly after the outbreak of the First World War, Emily Hobhouse co-founded the Swiss Relief Fund for Starving Children in Central Europe, based in Zurich, Switzerland. The fund was established to provide urgently needed food, clothing, and material aid to children in the warring nations of Central Europe who faced starvation and deprivation as blockades and mobilisation disrupted food supplies.

True to the humanitarian principles she had developed during the South African War, Hobhouse insisted that relief be provided impartially to children regardless of which side of the conflict their nations occupied — a stance that was controversial in an atmosphere of intense nationalist wartime sentiment in Britain, where aiding 'enemy' children was viewed with suspicion by some.

The Swiss Relief Fund became one of the important precursor organisations that contributed to the broader movement for international child welfare relief that emerged from the devastation of the First World War. Its work and ethos fed into the establishment of what would become Save the Children, founded in 1919 by Eglantyne Jebb, an organisation that remains one of the world's largest child welfare charities. Hobhouse's involvement demonstrated the continuity of her lifelong commitment to protecting civilian non-combatants — especially children — from the ravages of war, regardless of nationality.