Poverty takes community to foster and dismantle. Your role in poverty alleviation matters too.
Disclaimer: This is not an attempt to objectify or reduce the complexity of poverty alleviation to nameless faces or stereotypes. This exercise is rooted in the very real life of very real communities from colleagues in Uganda who first introduced us to this story, leveraging it as an inspiration to rethink poverty alleviation. We share it so that less 3-year-old children will die from treatable, interrelated causes.
A 3-year-old girl in your community just died from diarrhea. What realities in this child’s family, community, or environment might have contributed to her death?
Take a minute and map this out.
Try to be specific. So, rather than ignorance, put illiteracy or never heard of rehydration.
Try to be holistic. Think about the various dimensions that make up a human being-in-community: spiritual, social, relational, emotional, structural, natural, psychological, and economical.
Try to be relational. Consider how one factor might relate to another factor. Draw a line with a different color where you make a connection or correlation.
What does yours look like?
Here’s mine:
What do you notice about this illustration? Complicated, right?
Now, consider how the majority of our organizations or programs work. Suppose an intervention is planned to deal with the diarrhea problem:
If we preached the gospel alone, might this have stopped the child from dying?
If we brought in a clinic?
Dug a well?
Were you to handle the issue of parental neglect, might that have solved the problem?
What about hygiene? If you conducted the best hygiene program, might that solve the issue? If not, why not?
Now, each of these interventions matter. Your work matters. So, what’s missing?
I would suggest two vital things to the well-being of children and communities: collaboration and change.
Whether it is childhood malnutrition, the unprecedented number of displaced people, or the epidemic of anxiety firmly caused by a hyperconnected, social-media-laden world, poverty is complicated.
Frankly, poverty is too complex to take on alone. It requires building resilient bridges that can withstand the weight of causation while also leveraging possibility.
Local Collaboration: Poverty Takes Community
A response to whatever your 3-year-old-child situation requires organizing and empowering the community. Community includes residents, local institutions, neighboring communities, regional and national institutions, and outside experts.
They all matter.
Let’s make that clear, they all matter. The onus though must start locally.
It is what one Harvard Business Review article published in January 2022 would suggest is the difference between scaling up with scaling deep. The one looks at an opportunity to invest where the other looks at the opportunity to repurpose. The authors of the article, Suntae Kim and Anna Kim, sum it up best when they write about bricolage,
Bricolage is
Look back at the map you created of the 3-year-old child. Where does your organization or passion project land? What is its contribution?
Celebrate it. Then, recalibrate its placement in the larger narrative of poverty alleviation and the “jacks-of-all-trades” needed to actually impact communal well-being. The same article goes on to describe local leaders planting oak trees in the community. It is slow-going, but the outcome is rooted and lasting.
Think about bridges. One option is to import a lot of resources and scale up. Another is to consider the beaver who repurposes what is around its environment, redirecting entire ecosystems. This is the idea of scaling deep and building resilient bridges.
Leading with Change: Your Role in Poverty Alleviation
I get it. Your role feels like it is the most important role. Marketing experts advise it. Influencers demand it. Industrialization rides on the efficiency of specialization. Subsequently, the narratives can often present yourself as the hero to donors, policymakers, and community gatekeepers.
What would it look like to be the one who spotlights other heroes? What does it look like to see your bottom line – the well-being of the community in which you serve – inseparably linked to the bottom line of other changemakers, donors, policymakers, and community gatekeepers?
I love the idea of bricolage being rooted in “puttering about.” How often do we as teams and organization leaders in relief and development putter about? Who has time for it, right?
But, I think the notion of puttering about to better learn the local stories of local solutions is the penultimate prerequisite to lasting community change. What’s ultimate, you might ask? The humility and resolve as leaders to lean into the narrative that we are part of the solution, not the solution. We are a component of the bridge, but its inseparably linked with everyone else as well.
Hopefully, this idea makes you think of another illustration found in the Christian holy books: the human body.
The Apostle Paul, when considering the way that the church and its members operate, likens it to a healthy body. It is too rich of imagery to copy and paste, so I include it in its entirety below. (Might I suggest you replace the various body parts mentioned with names of organizations you sometimes consider competition or trendsetters?)
12-13 You can easily enough see how this kind of thing works by looking no further than your own body. Your body has many parts—limbs, organs, cells—but no matter how many parts you can name, you’re still one body. It’s exactly the same with Christ. By means of his one Spirit, we all said good-bye to our partial and piecemeal lives. We each used to independently call our own shots, but then we entered into a large and integrated life in which he has the final say in everything. (This is what we proclaimed in word and action when we were baptized.) Each of us is now a part of his resurrection body, refreshed and sustained at one fountain—his Spirit—where we all come to drink. The old labels we once used to identify ourselves—labels like Jew or Greek, slave or free—are no longer useful. We need something larger, more comprehensive. 14-18 I want you to think about how all this makes you more significant, not less. A body isn’t just a single part blown up into something huge. It’s all the different-but-similar parts arranged and functioning together. If Foot said, “I’m not elegant like Hand, embellished with rings; I guess I don’t belong to this body,” would that make it so? If Ear said, “I’m not beautiful like Eye, transparent and expressive; I don’t deserve a place on the head,” would you want to remove it from the body? If the body was all eye, how could it hear? If all ear, how could it smell? As it is, we see that God has carefully placed each part of the body right where he wanted it. 19-24 But I also want you to think about how this keeps your significance from getting blown up into self-importance. For no matter how significant you are, it is only because of what you are a part of. An enormous eye or a gigantic hand wouldn’t be a body, but a monster. What we have is one body with many parts, each its proper size and in its proper place. No part is important on its own. Can you imagine Eye telling Hand, “Get lost; I don’t need you”? Or, Head telling Foot, “You’re fired; your job has been phased out”? As a matter of fact, in practice it works the other way—the “lower” the part, the more basic, and therefore necessary. You can live without an eye, for instance, but not without a stomach. When it’s a part of your own body you are concerned with, it makes no difference whether the part is visible or clothed, higher or lower. You give it dignity and honor just as it is, without comparisons. If anything, you have more concern for the lower parts than the higher. If you had to choose, wouldn’t you prefer good digestion to full-bodied hair? 25-26 The way God designed our bodies is a model for understanding our lives together as a church: every part dependent on every other part, the parts we mention and the parts we don’t, the parts we see and the parts we don’t. If one part hurts, every other part is involved in the hurt, and in the healing. If one part flourishes, every other part enters into the exuberance. —1 Corinthians 12:12-26, MSG
When one ignores the other, every part is involved in the miscommunication, including that 3-year-old child. Jesus cares too much about our communities for us to miss him as the head and gift giver. Jesus is the changemaker that we are part of and finding our role within. It is his good work of changing the cosmos back into order and abundance that we are swept into as followers and active contributors to his bridging the divide from poverty back into shalom.
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What I love about the character of humility is that it names 1) I have room to grow, and 2) I need others in my own formation of resilience, or what much of Scripture calls perseverance.
With 40 years of tested application and practitioners from 21 countries, the Resilient Communities Center offers resources, spaces, and connections to support you in your work toward collaboration, change, and bridge building.
Through our cohorts, coaching, and communities, you will
Use a proven framework to activate resources on your team and in your neighborhood,
Refine your role around poverty alleviation,
Collaborate with like-minded individuals, and
Launch locally-made solutions that support well-being and resilience.
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