Jesse Rudy ’99 met Gary Haugen in Washington, D.C., in spring 1997. As a JBU sophomore and pre-law student, Rudy was in D.C. as part of a Council for Christian Colleges & Universities American Studies Program.
At the time, Haugen was a civil rights attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice. Rudy met Haugen through a fellow classmate who was interning with him, and Haugen presented his vision for International Justice Mission during one of their classes. Rudy wanted to learn more, so he took Haugen to lunch and bought him a hot dog from a street vendor.
“Gary wanted to create a world-class Christian nonprofit,” Rudy said. “I remember he wanted to staff it with people who were professionally excellent, desperately dependent on Jesus and desiring to punch bad guys in the mouth. I remember thinking, ‘I love all of those things.’”
Rudy knew he wanted to get involved but with one caveat.
“I wasn’t interested in moving overseas. It wasn’t on my radar,” he said. “But I thought what Gary was going to do was amazing.”
After graduating from JBU, Rudy attended the University of Virginia School of Law, and Haugen went on to launch IJM. The two stayed in touch, and Rudy and his wife, Amy ’99, supported IJM financially. Amy met Rudy at JBU, and the two married in 2000.
After passing the bar exam in August 2002, Rudy took a short-term mission trip with IJM for his celebratory “bar trip.” He and Amy traveled to India, where they documented cases of bonded child labor. The experience deepened the Rudys’ connection with IJM.
After that trip, Rudy joined a law firm in Washington, D.C., where he worked as a civil litigator.
“Our plan for how Amy and I would participate in the kingdom was that I would work as an attorney, hopefully make good money, and that we would be supporters,” he said. “Our contributions would be financial, and we would be involved in our church — that’s how we’d be part of the kingdom. Honestly, what I found over the first four years of practice is that I liked being an attorney. I was making fairly decent money, but I was also worse at giving it away than I thought I would be. I wasn’t having the impact I wanted to be having.”
In December 2005, a legal liaison position opened at IJM, and after fasting and praying, the Rudys decided that it might be easier to give up their lifestyle and careers than to give up their money. Rudy joined the IJM staff, and despite his caveat about never moving overseas, the family moved to Sri Lanka in May 2006.
Unfortunately, a civil war flared up, and a suicide bomber detonated outside of their apartment building. A few months later they were evacuated back to the U.S., and Rudy returned to practicing law.
In November 2008, IJM called and told Rudy, “A field director position just came open. We can’t tell you where it is. Are you in or are you out?”
“That’s a terrible pitch,” Rudy told them. “And also, not how you do HR. You’re asking me to quit my job, sell my home, uproot my family — my wife and three kids — and you’re not even telling me where on the planet we’re going? That’s just stupid. But yeah, we’re in.”
A few months later, IJM informed the Rudys they were being deployed to Uganda, where they would develop a program to combat succession-related property grabbing.
To Rudy, it initially sounded horribly boring.
“I didn’t know what those words meant, but it sounded like an accountant and a lawyer got together in a back room and came up with a bad movie,” he said.
Nevertheless, their family of five — Jesse, Amy, Rachel, Isaac and Lev — made the move to Uganda in April 2009.
On Rudy’s first day, his new IJM team sat him down in a little tent outside their office, which served as the conference room. They brought out their full portfolio of case files and walked Rudy through each story.
“They told me story after story of women and children who were being driven out of their homes by men intent on stealing the land they were living on,” Rudy said. “They described every horrible thing that a man can do to a woman: wells poisoned, livestock slaughtered, homes burned to the ground, children raped, women assaulted and murdered.”
Rudy said what became real to him that very first day was that horrible things are done to people all around the world, but the widows of East Africa might have it the worst.
“I don’t know that there’s anybody that is as alone and disposed of as a woman in rural Uganda when she loses her husband, and the clan that’s supposed to be her protectors and providers, and the neighbors that are supposed to be caring for her turn on her — consuming everything that she has and leaving her to die,” he said.
In response, Rudy and the IJM team developed a model in which local attorneys, investigators and social workers partnered with local police and prosecutors to restore victims to their homes and prosecute land grabbers for their crimes.
“The idea was that, by focusing on prosecutions first, we were not only helping our clients but also preventing future crimes,” Rudy said.
By the time the project ended in 2017, the team had put more than 1,000 widows and orphans back in their homes, supported the arrest and prosecution of nearly 100 violent criminals and saw victimization rates among widows in their project areas drop by 80% — meaning there were tens of thousands of women and children who never lost their homes.
The team’s work successfully deterred potential land grabbers.
After the project ended, Rudy and Haugen met to discuss how best to leverage its success. They realized there were several differences between the project and IJM’s other initiatives around the world and decided the best way to protect the most widows and orphans was to spin the work out into a stand-alone organization focused exclusively on pursuing James 1:27’s calling to “care for widows and orphans in their distress.”
On February 1, 2020, Rudy stepped out of 12 consecutive years at IJM and officially launched Redeem International with IJM’s support.
“I had a front-row seat watching God prepare Jesse for exactly this moment,” said Amy Rudy, director of administration at Redeem International. “His years at IJM — serving in various roles overseas, leading teams, working on strategy and fundraising, and even stepping in as interim CFO for a period — equipped him in remarkable ways to launch and lead Redeem. Looking back, it’s clear that each experience was building toward something.”
Rudy’s initial vision for Redeem International was to launch 10 intervention teams in strategic locations across Uganda. Each team is made up of 12 local justice professionals: attorneys, investigators, social workers, community relations, security and administrators.
“Their job is to restore victims to their homes, prosecute land grabbers for their crimes and broadcast it as loudly as possible, so that anybody who thinks land grabbing is a good idea realizes it’s not going to work out like they think it is — ultimately driving down victimization rates,” he said.
As the number of teams grew, Redeem’s board of directors told Rudy he needed to find a No. 2 person to come on board — someone he could hand some things off to. Naturally, Rudy thought of his good friend and former J. Alvin roommate, Greg Tarrant ’99. The two had worked together at IJM for a few years.
“It came as quite a surprise,” said Tarrant, who graduated from JBU with an international business degree. “Jesse is phenomenal. He is the kind of person you want to have found and run an organization. So, when he said, ‘You’d be perfect at this.’ I said, ‘I’d love to do this.’”
Tarrant joined Redeem International in 2022 as its chief operating officer.
“In scripture we find God saying, ‘My heart is with the people who are downtrodden,’” he said. “We talk about a lot of things within our faith, and clearly those things are in scripture. But this dwarfs everything. Thousands of scriptures are about this. It keeps coming up.”
Tarrant said in rural Africa, land is life, and that it determines whether you live or die. He said it’s taken from people just because someone else is more powerful.
“It’s a privilege to get to spend my time, my abilities and training on something where the end product is that a widow who otherwise would be destitute and maybe dead — including her family and lineage — is instead, sitting in a place where she is able to use the land that is rightfully hers to provide for her family,” he said.
Looking back, Tarrant said he and Rudy never would have imagined what God had in store for them together.
“If you had asked us as 18-year-old roommates, ‘Do you think someday you guys will work together in a nonprofit, trying to protect the land and homes of vulnerable widows and orphans?’ I would have said, ‘No way,’” Tarrant said. “‘Neither of us is heading that way. That seems crazy.’ It just shows the goodness of God — doing those things we can’t even ask or imagine.”
In June 2025, Redeem International realized its initial vision with 10 intervention teams across Uganda. In October, they began pursuing their next vision, launching a pilot in Zambia to replicate their work there.
Learn more about Redeem International: www.redeeminternational.org
This article is from the summer 2026 edition of the Brown Bulletin. Access the full issue.