When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor . . . and Yourself

by Steve Corbett

all of us have been heavily influenced by the modern worldview, which believes that human reason and effort are able to understand and control the material world without a need for understanding or relying upon God. As a result, we are very prone to putting our trust in ourselves and in technology to improve our lives, forgetting that it is God who is the Creator and Sustainer of us and of the laws that make the technology work.

Churches are uniquely positioned to provide the relational ministries on an individual level that people like Alisa need. While making major changes to national and international economic systems is more difficult, churches can often make just enough changes in local systems to allow people like Alisa to move out of material poverty. Such systemic change can take on the form of political advocacy, but more often it simply means changing the economic options for the materially poor so that they have an opportunity to support themselves.

Consider your community, city, or region. How might the economic, social, religious, and political systems be unjust and oppressive to some people? If you are able, ask several materially poor people or people who are ethnic minorities (e.g., Native Americans, African Americans, Hispanics in the Southwestern part of the United States) to share their perspective on this with you. Spend some time really listening to them and considering what they have to say. Then ask: is there anything you or your church could do to make these systems more just?

Do the ministries to the poor with which you are involved narrate that God is the Creator, Sustainer, and Redeemer of the technology, resources, and methods that you are bringing? Or are you inadvertently communicating that the power is in the technology, resources, and methods?

A helpful first step in thinking about working with the poor in any context is to discern whether the situation calls for relief, rehabilitation, or development. In fact, the failure to distinguish among these situations is one of the most common reasons that poverty-alleviation efforts often do harm.

“Relief” can be defined as the urgent and temporary provision of emergency aid to reduce immediate suffering from a natural or man-made crisis.

“Rehabilitation” begins as soon as the bleeding stops; it seeks to restore people and their communities to the positive elements of their precrisis conditions. The key feature of rehabilitation is a dynamic of working with the tsunami victims as they participate in their own recovery,

“Development” is a process of ongoing change that moves all the people involved—both the “helpers” and the “helped”—closer to being in right relationship with God, self, others, and the rest of creation. In particular, as the materially poor develop, they are better able to fulfill their calling of glorifying God by working and supporting themselves and their families with the fruits of that work. Development is not done to people or for people but with people. The key dynamic in development is promoting an empowering process in which all the people involved—both the “helpers” and the “helped”—become more of what God created them to be, moving beyond point 3 to levels of reconciliation that they have not experienced before.

The Good Samaritan’s handouts were appropriate for the person at point 1, a victim who needed material assistance to stop the bleeding and even prevent death; however, the person at point 3 is not facing an emergency, and handouts of material assistance to such people do not help to restore them to being the productive stewards that they were created to be.

Many of the people coming to your church for help will state that they are in a crisis, needing emergency financial help for utility bills, rent, food, or transportation.

First, is there really a crisis at hand? If you fail to provide immediate help, will there really be serious, negative consequences? If not, then relief is not the appropriate intervention, for there is time for the person to take actions on his own behalf.

Second, to what degree was the individual personally responsible for the crisis? Of course, compassion and understanding are in order here, especially when one remembers the systemic factors that can play a role in poverty. But it is still important to consider the person’s own culpability in the situation, as allowing people to feel some of the pain resulting from any irresponsible behavior on their part can be part of the “tough love” needed to facilitate the reconciliation of poverty alleviation. The point is not to punish the person for any mistakes or sins he has committed but to ensure that the appropriate lessons are being learned in the situation.

Third, can the person help himself? If so, then a pure handout is almost never appropriate, as it undermines the person’s capacity to be a ste...

Fourth, to what extent has this person already been receiving relief from you or others in the past? How likely is he to be receiving such help in the future? As special as your church is, it might not be the first stop on the train! This person may be obtaining “emergency” assistance from one church or organization after another, so that you...

we later found out that she had received similar assistance from other members of our community for many weeks, and we still see her going door-to-door asking for food. When neighbors have sought to provide her with long-term solutions, she has refused such help. The loving thing to do for this woman is for the entire community to withhold further relief, to explain our reason for doing so, and to offer her wide-open arms should she choose a path of walking together with us in finding long-term solutions.

consider the savings and credit association affiliated with Jehovah Jireh Church, a congregation located in a slum in Manila, the Philippines.

Once a month the members of our church graciously bought food, prepared a meal, served it to the shelter residents, and cleaned up afterward. We did everything short of spoon-feeding the men, never asking them to lift a finger in the entire process. A more developmental approach would have sought greater participation of these men in their own rehabilitation, asking them to exercise stewardship as part of the process of beginning to reconcile their key relationships. We could have involved the men every step along the way, from planning the meal, to shopping for the food, to helping with serving and cleanup.

We could have done supper with the men, working and eating side by side, rather than giving supper to the men, engaging in a provider-recipient dynamic that likely confirmed our sense of superiority and their sense of inferiority.

Ensure participation of the affected population in the assessment, design, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of the assistance program.

Homeless men might actually know something about, well, being homeless.

The local people will typically have a better understanding of the best way to get the job done. Moreover, the entire goal of development work is for local people to take charge of their individual lives and communities. Rushing in with all sorts of outside knowledge and resources can undermine the four key relationships in that community, one of which is being a steward of “the rest of creation.” If they need help, give it; but if they do not, your giving may do harm.

Whenever possible, the first responders to a crisis should be the victims’ family members, whether those family members are geographically local or not (1 Tim. 5:3–4).

Flinging resources around undermines the development of individual and communal stewardship, responsibility, and capacity.

an attitude of humility and brokenness is everything. The provider-receiver dynamic in the relief situation lends itself to all of the problems we have discussed concerning the god-complexes of the providers interacting with the recipients’ feeling of inferiority.

Development workers commonly refer to Kibera as “scorched earth,” because decades of well-meaning outside organizations have made it nearly impossible to do long-lasting development work there. Failing to recognize that the appropriate intervention in Kibera is neither relief nor rehabilitation, outside organizations have poured in financial and human resources, crippling local initiative in the process.

Like the proverbial scriptural reference to the birthplace of Jesus Christ, many people believe that “nothing good can come out of Kibera.”

In reality, many of the problems of Kibera stem from chronic issues that can only be solved through a consistent and long-term relationship between the change agent and the residents.

The people in Kibera have capacities, skills, and resources that need to be tapped if genuine development is to be realized, but the process of identifying and mobilizing these gifts and assets takes time.

Unfortunately, for many years nongovernment organizations working in Kibera have tended to operate on the basis of “quick fixes.” Frustrations set in because changes in individuals are not forthcoming as quickly as anticipated. Many of these organizations then either close down or move to other parts of the country, leaving people in a worse situation than they were before. In the process, individual and community lives have been devastated. It appears that many donors are willing to give to any venture as long as they see pictures of “dilapidated” Kibera….

The root issue in all of these considerations is that God, who is a worker, ordained work so that humans could worship Him through their work. Relief efforts applied inappropriately often cause the beneficiaries to abstain from work, thereby limiting their relationship with God through distorted worship or through no worship at all.

Do not do things for people that they can do for themselves.

Being from a materialistic culture, North Americans often view the solution to poverty in material terms and tend to pour financial and other material resources into situations in which the real need is for the local people to steward their own resources.

Many of us assume that we have a lot to teach the materially poor about God and that we should be the ones preaching from the pulpit, teaching the Sunday school class, or leading the vacation Bible school. We do have much to share out of our knowledge and experiences, but oftentimes the materially poor have an even deeper walk with God and have insights and experiences that they can share with us, if we would just stop talking and listen.

Knowledge paternalism occurs when we assume that we have all the best ideas about how to do things. As a result, the materially poor need us to think for them concerning the best way to plant crops, to operate their businesses, or to cure diseases. Handling knowledge is a very tricky area in poverty alleviation, because the truth is that we often do have knowledge that can help the materially poor. But we must recognize that the materially poor also have unique insights into their own cultural contexts and are facing circumstances that we do not understand very well.

All of us need to remember that the materially poor really are created in the image of God and have the ability to think and to understand the world around them.

it is reflective of a god-complex to assume that we have all the knowledge and that we always know what is best.

For example, in a lower-class church, prayers tend to be participatory, with individual members praying for God to heal specific problems that they are having. In contrast, in middle-class churches the pastor tends to offer the prayers, asking God more generally to “help those who are sick.”

Labor paternalism occurs when we do work for people that they can do for themselves.

Relative to many other cultures, including many low-income communities in North America, we are prone to take charge, particularly when it appears that nobody else is moving fast enough. As a result, we often plan, manage, and direct initiatives in low-income communities when people in those communities could do these things quite well already. The structure and pace might be different if the low-income communities undertook the projects themselves, but they could do a good job nonetheless.

They do not need to take charge because they know that we will take charge if they wait long enough.

the goal is not to produce houses or other material goods but to pursue a process of walking with the materially poor so that they are better stewards of their lives and communities, including their own material needs.

There are times when the Holy Spirit might move us to do something for the materially poor that they can do for themselves. But just remember that these situations are the exception, not the rule. Avoid paternalism.

relief is easier to do than development. It is much simpler to drop food out of airplanes or to ladle soup out of bowls than it is to develop long-lasting, time-consuming relationships with poor people, which may be emotionally exhausting.

it is easier to get donor money for relief than for development. “We fed a thousand people today” sounds better to donors than “We hung out and developed relationships with a dozen people today.”

the church is designed by Christ Himself to be all about developing and growing people through long-term discipleship!7

starting with a focus on needs amounts to starting a relationship with low-income people by asking them, “What is wrong with you? How can I fix you?” Given the nature of most poverty, it is difficult to imagine more harmful questions to both low-income people and to ourselves! Starting with such questions initiates the very dynamic that we need to avoid, a dynamic that confirms the feelings that we are superior, that they are inferior, and that they need us to fix them.

“asset-based community development” (ABCD)

ABCD puts the emphasis on what materially poor people already have and asks them to consider from the outset, “What is right with you? What gifts has God given you that you can use to improve your life and that of your neighbors? How can the individuals and organizations in your community work together to improve your community?”

Instead of looking outside the low-income individual or community for resources and solutions, ABCD starts by asking the materially poor how they can be stewards of their own gifts and resources, seeking to restore individuals and communities to being what God has created them to be from the very start of the relationship. Indeed, the very nature of the question—What gifts do you have?—affirms people’s dignity and contributes to the process of overcoming their poverty of being.

Pouring in outside resources is not sustainable and only exacerbates the feelings of helplessness and inferiority that limits low-income people from being better stewards of their God-given talents and resources. When the church or ministry stops the flow of resources, it can leave behind individuals and communities that are more disempowered than ever before.