Our History
Past
Where it Began
Redeem’s founder and CEO, Jesse Rudy, began his career as an attorney in Washington, DC. After several years in private practice, he joined International Justice Mission (IJM) to use his legal training to protect the poor from violence.
While with IJM, Jesse led a team that piloted a program for combating land grabbing from widows and orphans in Central Uganda. That team restored more than 1,000 widows and orphans to their land, secured the arrest and prosecution of nearly 100 land grabbers for their crimes, and saw victimization rates drop by an astonishing 80% over the course of eight years.
Inspired by the pilot project’s success, Jesse founded Redeem to take the model to scale. With IJM’s support and partnership, Jesse launched Redeem on February 1, 2020.
Present
Justice in Action
Notwithstanding the challenges of launching operations during a global pandemic, Redeem set out to protect Uganda’s widows and orphans by deploying ten Intervention Teams to strategic locations across the country.
Redeem’s first Intervention Team deployed to Gulu in October 2020, restoring 114 victims and securing the prosecution of 30 land grabbers in its very first year of operations. Since then, Redeem has deployed nine more Ugandan Intervention Teams, launching its tenth team in Tororo in June 2025.
Collectively, these teams are working to secure the arrest and prosecution of hundreds of violent criminals, restore thousands of land grabbing victims to their homes, prevent the abuse of tens of thousands of would-be victims, and provide much-needed protection to millions of widows and orphans.
Future
Expanding Hope
Redeem’s vision for the future is a world in which widows and orphans thrive in safety and security. To that end, Redeem will continue working diligently to protect Uganda’s widows and orphans from the devastation of land grabbing.
At the same time, we will also work to bring protection to widows and orphans beyond Uganda’s borders. In October 2025, Redeem launched a pilot to test the efficacy of our model in bringing protection to widows and orphans in Zambia.
We hope that the Zambian pilot will be the first of many replications of our model, and that our work will one day bring hope to the hundreds of millions of widows and orphans living across Sub-Saharan Africa.