Charity Detox Quotes

“Community transformation is about the quality of neighbors, not the quality of programs.”
― Robert D. Lupton, Charity Detox: What Charity Would Look Like If We Cared About Results

“I can’t stress it enough: business growth is key to moving the poverty needle.”
― Robert D. Lupton, Charity Detox: What Charity Would Look Like If We Cared About Results

“the only effective charity is the kind that asks more from those being served, rather than less. Asking for more sends an affirming message to the recipient that he or she also has something of value to offer.”
― Robert D. Lupton, Charity Detox: What Charity Would Look Like If We Cared About Results

“But not all arriving tourists evoke such positive responses. The sight of a van loaded with T-shirted mission-trippers elicits the opposite reaction. The short-term missionaries on board are unwitting saboteurs of the fragile micromerchant economy. Instead of bolstering local enterprise through their purchases, these tourists-on-a-mission eviscerate local businesses by flooding the market with suitcases full of free clothes, shoes, and other saleable goods. Their naive kindness undercuts the very system locals depend on for their livelihood—as Patrick Woodyard confirmed before he launched his Nisolo brand.”
― Robert D. Lupton, Charity Detox: What Charity Would Look Like If We Cared About Results

“economists like Sachs view reality from a sanitary thirty-thousand-foot distance, not at a grassroots level where social entrepreneurs sweat over spreadsheets. The amazing gains in global poverty alleviation are primarily the result of mushroom explosions in the economies of India and China. Very little change has taken place in sub-Saharan Africa or Latin America.”
― Robert D. Lupton, Charity Detox: What Charity Would Look Like If We Cared About Results

“Social entrepreneurs are driven to find sustainable solutions to the world’s perplexing social problems.”
― Robert D. Lupton, Charity Detox: What Charity Would Look Like If We Cared About Results

“Subsidizing inactivity is a bad practice. Yes, people have to survive. But they will not thrive if they are induced by charity (public or private, government or religious) to be unproductive. Purposeful work is what establishes one’s place in society. In addition to providing legitimate income, work is what gives one purpose, enables one to develop a skill, earns one a positive reputation.”
― Robert D. Lupton, Charity Detox: What Charity Would Look Like If We Cared About Results

“Helping strategies, if indeed they are to be ultimately helpful, demand careful examination of long-term implications. There is no guarantee that unexamined charity will have a redemptive outcome simply because it ‘seems right’ or feels good to the giver.”
― Robert D. Lupton, Charity Detox: What Charity Would Look Like If We Cared About Results

“I have begun to publicly declare that the only thing that will enable the poor to emerge from poverty is a decent job. And the primary creators of decent jobs are businesspeople who believe deeply in the free-enterprise system.”
― Robert D. Lupton, Charity Detox: What Charity Would Look Like If We Cared About Results

“It is beginning to dawn on the world of compassion that the root causes of poverty can be addressed effectively only through development, not through one-way giving.”
― Robert D. Lupton, Charity Detox: What Charity Would Look Like If We Cared About Results

“The strategy of crisis intervention must then shift to a strategy of development.”
― Robert D. Lupton, Charity Detox: What Charity Would Look Like If We Cared About Results

“American churches are at the forefront of the burgeoning compassion industry, spending billions on dependency-producing food pantries, clothes closets, service projects, and mission trips that serve mainly themselves and inadvertently turn people into beggars.”
― Robert D. Lupton, Charity Detox: What Charity Would Look Like If We Cared About Results