Do the Word

Kudos to the Los Angeles Mission for their video, 5 Ways To Help The Homeless. It’s a great example of how nonprofit ministries and missionaries can and should use video to coach champions in the cause rather than promoting their own ministry through tear jerking videos.

I encourage you to take a minute to watch the video. Here’s what I think is particularly well done:

1. The video doesn’t take place at the mission. It doesn’t feature sad, exaggerated images of homeless people that portray them as objects of pity. Rather, it shows homeless people where champions normally encounter them in LA, namely, on freeway offramps and panhandling on the street. It is so essential in champion coaching videos to depict where champions normally encounter the cause…not where you do (i.e., your building).
2. The video depicts other champions talking about the cause–their questions, insights, and experiences. Other champions are rarely seen in most nonprofit/missionary videos. Instead, what we get are shots of “the need”, “the solution”, “the testimony”, etc.
3. The video positions the champion as the actor (i.e., the one responsible to help the homeless) and the mission as an optional platform for collective action for interested champions. That is, the video doesn’t say that to help the homeless you should support the mission. Instead, it shows how you, the champion, can help the homeless through your own direct action, which can be enhanced by drawing on the mission’s experience, location, and resources. In the video, the mission is resourcing you, whether or not you choose to resource it.
4. The video gives champions something to do other than pray ‘n’ give, that classic pair. Pleasantly, when praying and giving are mentioned, the mission is not depicted as the recipient of either but rather as the platform for you to impact the cause directly. Note, for example, that you are given suggestions about how to pray for homeless people.
5. There is a homeless person in the video who is portrayed as an authority, rather than as an object of pity. Praise God. Rarely do I see nonprofit/missionary videos where the intended recipients of help are portrayed as wise, knowledgeable authorities worth listening to.

There are a few things the video lacks that would be nice additions, most particularly mention of what the Bible calls Christians (or, should the mission be seeking to reach a broader audience, people of faith in general) to do relative to the poor. A list of scriptures for further study would be great, as would an explicit invitation for champions to email their questions about helping the homeless.

I watched the other six videos the Los Angeles Mission has posted on their Vimeo site. Disappointingly, they’re all examples of traditional transactional fundraising rather than coaching champions. I hope the mission will make more videos like 5 Ways and less like their year-end message, which could be a traditional transactional fundraising year-end message for any charity with a little cut-and-paste action to change the organization’s name and swap in different tear-jerking footage.

I’ve enjoyed and grown from all of the posts and comments we’ve had on this site over the last two weeks about Haiti and a Transformational response to tragedy and crisis.

Still, before this blog meanders on to other subjects (though I hope our hearts, hands, and heads stay steadfastly on Haiti in no small part), I wanted to make sure you saw what I think is the best post on Haiti that, um, didn’t appear on our site.

It comes from Nathaniel Whittemore at the Social Entrepreneurship blog, under the heading, What Goes Wrong With Rebuilding Efforts (And How To Do Better This Time).

Whittemore’s post is so good that it would be worthwhile to cut and paste every word. Let me leave you to the link, however, and simply highlight what I believe is Whittemore’s best thought–one made in a disappointingly small number of articles on the quake in Haiti since it happened, and one that applies not only to every disaster but to every dimension of ministry:

Everyone impacted by this earthquake is a victim, but to successfully implement immediate and long-term relief programs, aid organizations have to be able to get beyond the “victimhood” of the people they’re serving to actively engage their ideas and talents to work with, not only for, local people.

You go, bro. We don’t simply give to; we suffer with.

And we don’t end with suffer with; we press on to listen to and  work with. And give with, too.

That’s the rarified air of Transformation. And I almost suspect that every tragedy and crisis that has received a lasting and effective response has been grounded in that principle.

Perhaps that’s what Augustine was thinking when he wrote about the biggest reclamation project of them all:

God made you without you. You didn’t, after all, give any consent to God making you. How were you to consent, if you didn’t yet exist? So while he made you without you, he doesn’t justify you without you. So he made you without your knowing it, he justifies you with your willing consent to it.

Since the earthquake in Haiti we’ve dedicated this space to voices dialoguing about two questions:

• What do you believe is a transformational response to disaster?
• Are there any unique dynamics that Transformational Giving brings to such a response?

As the voices have eloquently demonstrated, it’s anything but fiddling while Rome burns. The lead Haiti story for each of the last three days while I’ve been assembling these posts has been a variant on “Aid groups struggle to get food and water to Haitians”.

This in no way means that it’s not crucial for us to give. It is. It’s just that it’s crucial for us to give in ways that involve us doing more than hunting for the most reputable aid organization through which to give. As history and at least the last three global disasters have demonstrated:

• An initial flow of money is rarely the impediment to disaster relief
• That flow of money dries up astonishingly quickly, well before the need does, and typically well before we are changed by what we have learned (which tends to be a lot about disaster and comparatively little about the people who are experiencing it)
• There is a great deal of giver’s remorse a few short months after the disaster, as, inevitably, news stories crop up that disclose that Major Disaster Relief Organization X still has designated money in the bank from the last disaster that it has yet to spend, or the projects that Major Relief Agency Y undertook aren’t really helping a lot.

None of this excuses us from responding, and none of this means that major disaster relief agencies don’t, on the whole, do a great job.

It just means that getting an online donation to a major disaster relief agency may not–ought not–to be the beginning or the end of the story.

I hope that, like me, you’ve benefited from the voices who have guest posted and commented on the site. I found the whole experience to be, well, transformational–and I don’t mean that in the sense of emotionally gratifying, personally sizzling, neat, cool, or even fun.

I mean that the discussion has transformed what I understand about Haiti, instilled in me the importance of suffering with in addition to giving to in disaster relief, and given me a lot to process as my wife and I have considered how to respond to this tragedy that is so much bigger than anything the small screen of TV and laptop can convey.

It seems appropriate  to me to conclude this series by letting you know briefly how we chose to give, and why. I will withhold the name of the specific entity through which we are choosing to give, as my point is not to drum up support for a worthy institution. There are certainly enough websites doing that.

I want to share with you where and how we chose to give mainly as a very personal window into how the Transformational Giving process and what the contributors to this blog over the past week have written has impacted us. Mutual accountability and all that.

In following Jon Hirst’s six-step process to thinking through how to respond transformationally,  we learned something fascinating in our research on Haiti:

The World Bank reports that of the $1.2 billion sent from the US to Haiti in 2009, a surprisingly large share came from the 300,000 Haitians who live in the United States.

That reminded us of another people who certainly run the risk of potentially being named among the globe’s most tragic:

North Koreans.

Especially North Korean defectors, 300,000 of whom live illegally in hiding in China and 15,000 of whom live in challenging cultural and economic conditions in South Korea.

Going on a decade ago, my wife and I noticed that when it came to helping North Korea, most people opted for giving through reputable major aid agencies.

Very few people attempted to reach North Korea through North Korean defectors.

And yet when we talked to the aid agencies and the North Koreans, we consistently found that the North Korean defectors had strikingly better insights into how to help and who to help–and how not to help–than the aid agencies did.

After all, North Korean defectors weren’t simply motivated by humanitarian concerns. They were motivated by trying to help family members not die.

That will definitely motivate a person to stretch every aid dollar and press it into practice as quickly as possible.

So as we read about and prayed about and studied about Haiti, we couldn’t help but be drawn to the news stories (like this one) that shared how Haitians in America were reacting to the crisis.

The news stories would drop clues about how many of these Haitian Americans had been helping Haiti consistently, powerfully, and effectively long before this latest disaster. After all, if we’ve learned anything in the last few weeks, it’s that Haitians are fairly well used to a life of disasters.

We read the stories and looked at Haitian American Protestant churches and found ones for whom crisis response in Haiti was not only nothing new but was for them a way of life, in an effort to change the way of life that involves all too much crisis in Haiti.

And that’s how we are giving.

We wanted to show our faith in this group, to listen to them, to let them–rather than a major aid agency–take the lead in guiding the way we think about Haiti, and how to show the love of God to that country and its people, not just in this disaster, but in what may come.

May God bless you in your own journey of discerning where to give in response to this tragedy. May you be transformed as you give so that you not only give but suffer with, learn, and last with your Haitian brothers and sisters, long after the Internet and this blog have moved on to other things.