How The American Red Cross Makes And Spends Its Billions

It’s the season of giving with Thanksgiving and Christmas on the horizon, and the American Red Cross has long been recognized as the universal symbol of humanitarian services. It’s an enormous and expensive operation. The American Red Cross has about 230 chapters nationwide with almost 18,000 employees and more than a quarter of a million volunteers, responding to more than 60,000 disasters every year. In 2022, the American Red Cross had net assets of about $2.7 billion and spent just over $3 billion in operating expenses the same year. So how exactly does the American Red Cross make and spend its billions? Chapters: 01:35 American Red Cross 03:32 Finances 07:44 Transparency Produced by: Juhohn Lee Edited by: Nora Rappaport Animation: Andrea Schmitz Supervising Producer: Lindsey Jacobson Additional Footage: Getty Images, American Red Cross, Library of Congress Additional Sources: Nobel Prize, United States House of Representatives, Congressional Research Service