In 1994, Jeff Koons’s son Ludwig, then one year old, was taken from his Manhattan home to Italy by his mother, Ilona Staller, despite a US court order requiring that he remain in New York State and granting joint custody to both parents. An international legal battle would slowly make its way through the courts for many years to come. Even the simplest legal questions lacked clarity and resolution—such basic issues as who had jurisdiction over the case, for example, were in dispute. Ultimately US lawmakers sided with Koons while Italian lawmakers sided with Staller. Meanwhile, amid this long swirl of legalities and irresolution, a young child was growing up.

At the time, there were limited resources to which Koons could turn for guidance or assistance. Yet around that same moment in the mid-1990s, the urgent need for such resources was becoming obvious on a wide scale.

The International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children (ICMEC) was born out of the deepest of tragedies. It traces its roots directly to a crisis in Belgium: in 1996, police captured a vicious serial killer named Marc Dutroux, now infamous for his crimes against six girls, aged eight to nineteen. The case was devastating not only because of the unbelievably heinous nature of the crimes but also because it revealed, in an unprecedentedly high-profile way, a series of grave missteps and oversights on the part of the law enforcement and justice systems during the investigation. Ultimately, over 300,000 people joined a Brussels protest march, known as the White March, demanding reforms for the protection of children.

In response, the Belgian government looked to the international community for assistance and guidance. Their prime minister visited the United States and invited the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) to establish a base in Brussels. The president of NCMEC at the time, Ernie Allen, was eager to help, but he understood the complexities involved in the effort. His response was, “You do not need an American solution to this problem—you need a Belgian solution.” NCMEC did work with the Belgian community to provide immediate assistance, though, and helped to establish the Brussels-based group Child Focus.

Even then, the depth of the problem on an international level was just beginning to be understood, as more and more countries began reaching out to NCMEC for assistance. In 1999, the NCMEC Board of Directors created ICMEC to engage these issues more deeply and on a global scale. Koons was involved right from the beginning.

ICMEC has expanded and evolved over the last eighteen years. It has established relationships with citizens in more than 122 countries as it works to enhance communication, share successful methods of outreach, educate first responders, support law enforcement, and advocate for legal systems capable of swift response. It also works to establish globally recognized definitions for various offenses and to provide benchmarks that can act as guidelines in future cases. Currently, for instance, it is mounting an initiative to raise awareness about differences among nations in how and when children are considered “missing.” By way of example, more than 460,000 reports of missing children were filed in the United States alone in 2015, while the numbers are 45,000 and 20,000 in Canada and Spain respectively. It’s not that children are more likely to go missing in the United States, or that they are in greater danger, it’s simply that the definition of what constitutes a missing child is not universal.

Koons’s personal history led him directly to this great organization. He knows firsthand the impact ICMEC has had in raising awareness and pressing for the greater effectiveness of international legal instruments. He became a board member at ICMEC in 2002, and in 2007 he cofounded The Koons Family Institute on International Law & Policy as the organization’s research arm. The mission of the Institute is to provide authoritative, impactful research on the most current trends in the child protection field. This information is critical to policy makers and first responders, and informs the curriculum that ICMEC provides through its Global Training Academy.

In the interview that follows, Koons shares his family’s story and explains how this philanthropic pursuit has affected his life. And Ambassador Maura Harty, the President and Chief Executive Officer of ICMEC, gives us insight into the agency and its hugely ambitious goals, and helps us see how its work is changing the world.