Swami Vivekananda founded the Ramakrishna Mission on 1 May 1897 at Belur, near Calcutta, several months after returning from his lecture tours in the United States and Europe. The Mission took its name and its guiding inspiration from Vivekananda's own teacher, the Bengali mystic Ramakrishna, whose intense personal devotion across multiple religious paths, Vaishnava, Shakta, Islamic and Christian practice among them, had shaped Vivekananda's own conviction that the world's religions ultimately point toward one truth.
Vivekananda organized the Mission around a principle he summarized as service to humanity as service to God, deliberately pairing traditional monastic renunciation with organized social work, a combination that had few precedents in Indian monastic history at that scale. From its founding, the Mission ran schools, hospitals, famine relief operations and disaster response alongside its religious and educational activities, staffed by monks who had taken formal vows within the Ramakrishna Order.
The Mission operates alongside, and under shared leadership with, the Ramakrishna Math, the purely monastic organization Vivekananda had established slightly earlier for the training and ordination of monks. Together the two institutions expanded rapidly across India in the decades after their founding and later established centers abroad, particularly in the United States and Europe.