Stephanie Kinnunen, who founded the magazine with her husband, Kelly, in November 2006, says she got a call from her security company at 3:42 a.m. Sunday alerting her to a keypad malfunction on the office system. When she stopped by on Sunday afternoon, however, she discovered that the malfunction was really burglars who had jimmied the lock on the entry door to their office, cut the system’s power and phone lines and made off with around $25,000 worth of equipment.

“They took everything electronic: computers, mouses, printers, even our $8 Ikea lamps,” she said. Kinnunen says no other offices in the building were burglarized. The building is a nondescript warehouse on Kennedy Street, and the NEED office, only accessible from an interior hallway, is on the fifth floor. Still police believe it was an amateur job, “probably just kids out and about,” she said.

The magazine is coming off a difficult yet impressive first year. Funded in large part by the Kinnunens’ personal credit card (and, now, some donors and advertisers), the publication has been getting a lot of attention:  It won gold excellence awards from the Minnesota Magazine & Publishers Association, was dubbed one of 2007′s “hottest launches” by a top industry publication, and a copy ended up in the hands of one Bill Clinton.

But the year has been financially trying. Kinnunen has criss-crossed the country promoting the publication, securing distribution deals and looking for donors. Then two months ago, a box of personal checks was stolen from the Kinnunens’ mail and used on a Twin Cities buying spree, which now has them dealing with banks and collections agencies, all while they’re trying to secure a small business loan.

“This really hurts,” she said of the break-in. “We have insurance, but it’s going to take awhile to kick in. With such a skeleton staff and already a limited budget, it’s definitely going to put production of the next issue behind a bit.”

But there’s good news: Kinnunen’s husband, who was in Indonesia on assignment for the magazine when the break-in occurred, backs up all computer files weekly, so the layouts and fodder for the next issue are nearly all intact.

Still, it puts Kinnunen in an unusual position. Instead of laboring to draw attention to the needs of people around the world — from blind orphans in China (Issue 4) to kids kept as sex slaves in Cambodia to the victims of Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf States (both Issue 1) — she needs a little help herself.

“This can’t kill us. We’re going to move forward,” she said. “But we need some angels to come in and help us out financially, at least in the interim until our insurance kicks in.”

But the confrontation isn’t about guilt or shock, but hope: you can’t help but be moved by how much people are pitching in to help those in need–and how little it takes to remove a benign tumor, pick up a hammer, or provide supplies for groups giving girls hope after being sold into sexual slavery.

The brainchild of Kelly and Stephanie Kinnunen, NEED launches today with a print run of 25,000 copies and the simple mission of giving exposure to humanitarian aid organizations that do good work.

Beautifully designed and printed, perfect-bound, and filled with full-bleed photographs by photojournalists including Steve McCurry, the publication avoids the political, instead putting its energy toward connecting potential donors and volunteers for humanitarian causes with the beneficiaries of that work.

The inaugural issue begins with an introduction to Timon Bondo, a 70-year old Kenyan man who lives in Golden Valley and has almost single-handedly raised funds to build two schools and a healthcare center in his AIDS-ravaged village Rabondo. Bondo’s successes come mainly through cold-calling–and despite a major obstacle: he’s blind. But Stephanie Kunninen says NEED didn’t feature Bondo’s work simply to raise awareness of Rabondo or Bondo’s work, but to also highlight how the man sets about helping his village.

“If you want to help a little girl with a school uniform, he won’t let you buy a school uniform. You buy fabric; then he utilizes one of the local seamstresses and pays her to sew the uniform for the child,” she says. “One widow is taking care of 12 of her grandchildren because her husband and children have died from AIDS. So she makes bricks in her front yard while the children go to school, then when Timon does a building project, he buys the bricks from her instead of from the wealthy businessman in Nairobi.”

The issue also features an array of aid programs around the world, including literacy programs in Afghanistan (McCurry’s ImagineAsia among them); the floating MercyShips hospital that removed Marthaline’s tumor (and those of many others); and Right to Play, a group founded by Olympic speedskating gold medalist Joey Cheek that uses sports as a platform to teach kids around the world about healthy living. Issue 2 will look at child soldiers in northern Uganda, Colombia’s population of “internally displaced people” (the country has the world’s second largest population of IDPs), and Wings of Hope, to name a few.

The magazine, which sent out its first 2,500 issues over the past weeks, is a hit with philanthropists and nonprofits, says Kinnunen. She reports that a big supporter of the UN’s Refugee Committee, the UNHCR, ordered 100 subscriptions for friends and family, plus bought up 1,350 issues to send to the organization’s top monthly donors. But the Kinnunens are surprised at the buzz beyond this insider community.

“We’ve received a subscription from an inmate at Moose Lake Prison, a 16-year old high school student in Prior Lake Minnesota, an order of nuns in north Minneapolis, a woman in Virginia who owns a tattoo parlor,” she says. “NEED‘s demographic has really become all across the board. Even my mother’s friends are clamoring for this.”

But the early success has also earned other key endorsements: President Jimmy Carter agreed to an interview in the debut issue, and an impressive array of celebrated photojournalists have signed on. More remarkable is that group’s assessment.

“We hear over and over and over again from photographers, ‘This is the new LIFE Magazine for our generation of photojournalists.’ That’s such a huge compliment to us,” she says. “How could we ever — “I mean, we’re six people in a warehouse office in Northeast Minneapolis! To hear this could be the next LIFE magazine is such an honor and shock, almost.”

The magazine is also compared to another famous publication, one heralded for its edgy design and unflinching portrayal of graphic suffering in the world–Oliviero Toscani‘s COLORS. Kinnunen says wherever she and her husband have lived–most recently, they lived in Finland, where Kelly taught at a university and Stephanie taught business English–they sought out each issue of the publication. “We love the imagery of COLORS. We love the storytelling of colors, but again, we’re inspired by contact. There’s no way for us to become involved with the something. That’s the one thing we didn’t like about COLORS.”

The production value of NEED, however, is on par with COLORS‘, using full-color photos, with text as backup, to tell its stories. And NEED’s art-magazine price tag of $9 seems to reflect that quality. But the Kinnunen’s, who funded the magazine entirely with their own savings and their now-maxed-out credit cards, believe the cause is worth the price tag. “We have a 19.5% ad ratio to content, when we’re full. So if we’re full of ads, there’s 19.5% and you’re getting the highest quality printing, photography, and uninterrupted stories for nine dollars. If that’s of value of you, you see $9 as quite inexpensive. If you see $9 as too expensive, we do have a great website where people can get involved,” Kinnunen says.

But, more convincing is her argument of the need for such production values. On one hand, she and Kelly were inspired by the director of a refugee shelter Kelly volunteered for in Greece years ago; he refused a load of bread from a baker who “was trying to pass off day-old bread” on the shelter residents, retorting, “Just because these people are poor doesn’t mean they don’t deserve the very best.”

“So often aid organizations have such small budgets, and they don’t want to sacrifice their budgets that are going to directly helping people in need to promoting their work and connecting potential supporters to their work,” she adds. “We wanted to help in that way. How do we help the people who are helping the people on the ground and showing the people in need in a dignified way?”

Photos (top to bottom): Cover of NEED, an Afghani boy in school, by Steve McCurry; Timon Bondo by Justin Grierson; Afghani Girl by Steve McCurry; a volunteer with a homeowner in New Orleans, by Leslie Spurlock.