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

by Steve Corbett

The need is to get beyond token or even forced participation to having poor communities, churches, and families participate in planning, implementing, and evaluating the interventions in their lives.

The discussions about STMs need to include the potential calculations that may be going on in the minds of our materially poor brothers and sisters in Christ. If they really had the social, political, and economic power to speak their minds, we might be a bit surprised at what we might hear.

Middle-to-upper-class North American believers have to accept that their power has silenced their brethren at home and abroad more than we realize. People who have power seldom think about that power, while people who do not have it are very aware that they do not. This issue is much broader than STMs, but STMs are a big place where these tensions are silently played out.

The primary questions concerning STMs to poor communities need to focus on the impacts of the trips on those communities. It is not about us. It is about them!

The money spent on a single STM team for a one- to two-week experience would be sufficient to support more than a dozen far more effective indigenous workers for an entire year.

Ask local believers to share their insights with team members about who God is and how He works in their lives; have team members share the weaknesses in their own lives and churches, and have the local believers pray for them. If the local believers are materially poor, this can be a powerful step in overcoming any implicit beliefs that team members may have in the “health-and-wealth gospel”

Stay away from the “go-help-and-save-them” message and use a “go-as-a-learner” message.

Promises of tourist attractions and shopping excursions have found their way into the marketing literature for STMs. There is nothing wrong with enjoying such things; just don’t label vacations as “missions” nor dare ask people to fund them with their tithes and offerings.

For the first time in US history, more poor people live in suburbs than in cities.2

One of the tricky features of the new suburban poverty is that it is less visible than traditional, inner-city poverty. We are all familiar with the large-scale, urban housing projects that seem to announce their residents’ poverty to the world. In contrast, the suburban poor tend to be less densely concentrated and are scattered about in older apartment complexes, pockets of mobile homes, subdivisions of circa-1950 brick units, and low-income housing built behind strip malls.4

Will these churches’ message to the poor again be, “Not in my backyard!” as they load the pews into moving vans and relocate even farther away from those for whom Jesus cares so deeply? Or will suburban, evangelical churches embrace the ministry opportunities that are landing on their doorsteps, as poor people from every tongue, tribe, and nation move in across the street? Will they say, as the early church did, “Yes, in my backyard!”

Many poor people have behavioral problems that make them less than ideal workers. Moreover, historically some of these behaviors were exacerbated by a welfare system that penalized work by removing benefits as people’s earnings increased.

Economic globalization highlights the need for a strong educational system that produces workers not just with vocational training but also with sufficient general skills and the basic capacity to learn so that they can adapt to a rapidly changing, global economy.

Because public schools are largely dependent upon state and local tax revenues to meet their budgets, schools in poorer states and localities necessarily have fewer resources per pupil. Moreover, the formulas used to dispense national, state, and local funds have been shown to allocate significantly fewer resources to poor school districts, exacerbating the economic disparities that already exist.

Inadequate funding of schools in poor communities is one contributor to unprepared graduates, who then go on to earn low wages and to pay little in school taxes.

the process of saving and managing wealth develops positive attitudes and self-discipline, requiring people to replace a “live-for-today,” survival mentality with a “live-for-the-future,” investment mentality.9

When poor people are given savings incentives that are similar to those of the non-poor, for example in defined contribution 401(k) plans, they can and do save in large enough amounts to acquire much-needed wealth.24

Because participants are in the program for several years, mentoring teams and program staff have ample opportunity to walk with them in restorative relationships, helping both the poor people and the mentors to have a renewed sense of dignity and hope, to develop new patterns of behavior, and most important to experience the healing of Jesus Christ.

Dr. Yunus’s work has spawned the global microfinance (MF) movement, which aims to reach 175 million of the world’s poorest families with loans and other financial services (e.g., savings and insurance) by the end of 2015.3 Indeed, MF, which is sometimes also referred to as “microenterprise development,” has become one of the premier strategies for bringing economic empowerment to poor people in the Majority World.

Think of a time in which you took actions to effect positive change in your life. What caused you to take those actions?

Think of an individual(s) who has had a significant, positive impact on your life. How did they do this? What did you appreciate about their approach?

Change begins when something triggers the individual or group to reflect upon their current situation and to think about a possible future situation that they would prefer.

when people feel a profound sense of inferiority, there can be a huge impact from asking the simple question, “What gifts and abilities do you have?”

when people live in cultures that have been devoid of hope for centuries, a powerful trigger for change can be found in asking, “What are your dreams?”

One of the most significant obstacles to change is a lack of supportive people. We all do better when we have people cheering us on, supporting us through prayer, offering a listening ear, and lending a helping hand when we need it. Unfortunately, many times when people start to pursue positive change, the people around them feel threatened or jealous, and they actually start to fight against the person’s efforts to change.

Finding armies of people to volunteer one Saturday per year to paint dilapidated houses is easy. Finding people to love the people, day in and day out, who live in those houses is extremely difficult.

the goal is that everyone grows and overcomes elements of their own brokenness. This calls for humility and reciprocity for all involved in these relationships.

If poverty is rooted in broken relationships that result from both individual and systemic brokenness, then highly relational approaches are needed to alleviate poverty.

Remember, most North Americans have a bias to rush in and fix problems too fast, thereby crushing local ownership and initiative.

You do not need to know everything to start the process. Having the attitude of a humble learner throughout the process is far more important than having comprehensive knowledge at the start of it.

Development can only occur with people who are willing to change. If people do not believe that they are responsible to take actions to effect positive changes in their lives, it is very difficult to make progress with them.

regardless of how individuals or communities ended up in a bad situation, faithful stewardship on their part requires them to take whatever actions they can to use their gifts and resources to effect change.

If, as we get involved with people, it becomes clear that they are simply unwilling to even consider any changes, then it is not loving to enable them to persist in sin by providing them with handouts of food, clothing, or shelter. Rather, the loving thing to do is to allow them to feel the burden of their choice in hopes that this will trigger positive change. One caveat to this would be if the person is so mentally ill that they do not have the capacity to make responsible choices.

Note that even material assistance for the older widows without descendants was not automatic, as they had to be known for their good deeds before they could receive material assistance.

The Bible does not command mindless “generosity,” but rather the use of wisdom and prudence that keeps the end goal in mind: restoration of people to what they were created to be.

to give them material assistance when they do not need it is not the loving thing to do, and we are called to—truly—love our neighbors.

Are you receptive to the positive changes that God wants to make in your life? Stop and pray that God would make you more open to the changes that He wants to make in you.

What are your goals and dreams for your life? What strengths, abilities, and resources can you use to achieve those goals? What is the first action you will take to use your gifts to achieve your goals? By what date will you take this action? How could we support you in achieving your goals? Would you be willing to have a support person encourage you in meeting your goals? When can we meet with you again to check on how things are going?

This does not mean that Parkview can never ask any questions of the Jubilee Center or make suggestions. But it does mean that Parkview needs to embrace the idea that the most visible and enduring presence in the community needs to be the Jubilee Center, not Parkview Fellowship. And it does mean that Parkview needs to be extremely sensitive to the power dynamics involved with being a Caucasian church that is the major donor to a ministry, whose staff and community are primarily African American.

individuals and churches that have been blessed with financial resources like Parkview should dramatically increase their financial giving to churches and ministries that pursue gospel-focused, asset-based, participatory development. The churches and ministries that are engaged in development work have a very difficult time raising the funds needed to pay for this highly relational, timeintensive approach, an approach in which there are not always clear measures of success or of the “return on the investment.” Development ministries desperately need financial supporters who understand what poverty alleviation is really about—reconciling the four, key relationships—and who are willing to fund the long and winding process that must be used to get there. In short, Parkview needs to give more—much more—money to alleviate poverty, but it must do so more wisely.

many of the people that FCS enabled to obtain jobs and to get out of public housing left the community for “greener pastures,” thereby weakening the community as a whole. As a result, FCS changed its approach from working at the household level to working at the community level, which is the next option for the Jubilee Center to consider.