The Problem of Handouts
It was like clockwork. Every month, a church volunteer team would visit a nearby impoverished community and drop off the donated clothes they had faithfully collected over the previous weeks. With bright smiles and happy hearts, this ministry continued with great vigor as the months ticked by.
Many volunteers participated in the excitement of engaging with the community. But some of the clothing recipients soon grew wise to how the priority of distribution worked: neediest to least neediest. The solution…to look the neediest.
How? By burning their own clothes so they would look more needy and get new clothes!
When it became clear what was happening, the volunteers felt hurt and betrayed that their generosity was being abused in this way.
When engaging with the poor, we first need to ask, how do we help without hurting? How do we foster the God-given gift of work instead of reducing people and their abilities to dependence on our leftovers?
The Bible is clear: God gave humanity the GIFT of work.
In the Garden of Eden, God told Adam to work the land and produce a harvest. Every capable man and woman should be engaged in some kind of work. No one is meant to sit idly, depending only on the latest drop of stuff from a charity or church.
There is something about good, honest, consistent labor that produces self-esteem, dignity and respect in an individual. Work is not a curse, it’s a blessing!
How We Engage with Poverty
As believers, the way we understand poverty plays a major role in determining the solutions we attempt to use to alleviate it. Often, we think of poverty as a lack of material things––money, food, clothing, housing, etc. However, a World Bank study of over 60,000 people from 60 low-income countries was very revealing.
Poor people typically think of poverty in terms of shame, hopelessness, inferiority, powerlessness, fear and humiliation.
When working with the material poor, it is crucial to determine whether relief or development is the appropriate intervention.
“Relief” is the urgent provision of emergency aid to reduce immediate suffering from a natural or man-made crisis. It is characterized by a provider-receiver dynamic in which the provider gives assistance, often material, to the receiver, who is largely incapable of helping himself.
“Development” is a process of on-going change that is not done to people or for people but with people. It is an empowering process in which both the helpers and the helped become more of what God created them to be.
Applying the wrong intervention is likely to do harm to both the provider and receiver of the assistance. Providing relief when the situation calls for development means the receivers’ skills and resources are not utilized, which undermines the stewardship of their own lives and their communities. Relief (handouts) should only be applied when the receivers are unable to help themselves.
Therefore, our mandate as followers of Christ should be to ensure that each person who is capable of work has the opportunity to work. In a country like South Africa, which continues to battle with unemployment rates which are reported as being between 23 – 40% (depending on who you ask), the reality is, many people just can’t find jobs.
Entrepreneurship As a Solution
For this reason, the poor often have no choice but to turn to entrepreneurship. They must take some skill or talent they have and find a way to turn it into a business. The problem is, most have never run a business before and they struggle to know how to run a business a way that ensures a profit.
Sipho moved to Johannesburg from a rural part of South Africa with high hopes of employment. She needed to provide for her small twin boys after she lost her husband to AIDS. Upon arriving in the big city, she soon found that the place was teeming with job-seekers just like her and there were not nearly enough jobs for everyone.
After months of trying to find work, Sipho finally took stock of her skills and realised that she knew how to sew, and that she enjoyed doing it. She started making hats, scarves, tablecloths, children’s clothes––anything she could think of that people around her seemed to need.
Although Sipho sold her goods, she soon found that at the end of the month, she simply didn’t have the money she thought she had made. Having never run a business, she couldn’t make sense of it. Were her prices too low? Were her living expenses too high? Were people stealing from her? What was the problem?
Having no where to turn for help, Sipho became discouraged and soon turned to relying on handouts, skills and abilities unused, dignity lost, overwhelmed with shame.
Sadly, for all their hard work, many of the poor who become entrepreneurs actually lose money every month only because they lack basic business knowledge––how to find a target market, set prices with a mark-up that covers their costs, keep good records, issue invoices and receipts, etc. This gap of simple knowledge keeps them trapped in poverty, struggling to make a profit, falling into despair, feeling like a failure, without knowing where to gain the needed skills.
Down the road from Sipho was a well-meaning church, offering bread to the poor each Tuesday night. One volunteer, Steve, was an managing partner and accountant at a highly successful start-up company.
Every week, as he handed bread to Sipho and her two children, he felt a sting of guilt and uneasiness. He briefly knew her story, but no one had taken the time to find a way to empower her. Everyone was content to just give her bread, while her talents went unused in the prime of her life. He know that the bread only filled her family’s bellies for a few hours. It wasn’t actually changing her situation.
But Steve he knew a lot about business, banking and entrepreneurship. One night, on his way home, it hit him like a ton of bricks: His knowledge and her need could be matched!
Not only that, he realized that if he could get to know her––and others like her––as he taught them business, he could also introduce them to Christ! They did not have the opportunity to build long-term relationships while merely passing out bread.
What If?
Most people are capable of helping themselves. This does not mean we should do nothing to assist them, it just means that development, not relief, is the appropriate intervention. The development approach aims to avoid paternalism. This means we do not do things for people that they can do for themselves.
The goal of development is a process of walking with the materially poor so that they are better empowered to be stewards of their lives and communities, including their own material needs.
One program that offers that offers a solution like this is called Paradigm Shift. Paradigm Shift is a non-profit organization which has created a structured program for churches, Christian business forums and community organizations to use entrepreneurship as an avenue for ministry.
The Paradigm Shift programme combines practical business training with microloans, and couples that with structured biblical discipleship and personal mentoring.
Training, curriculum and easy-to-use tools are weaved together to intentionally equip volunteer teams to meet both the physical and spiritual needs of the poor who surround them in a way that empowers the poor to provide for themselves while beginning or growing in a relationship with Christ.
Many groups in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town and Durban are utilizing the Paradigm Shift program to match the skills of business professionals with the needs of the poor, and are transforming South Africa as they do.
What would it look like if every resourced church in every urban area of South Africa stopped giving handouts to those who were capable of working, and started offering effective, sustainable training program?
Maybe, with our collective efforts, we would see poverty decline, unemployment reduced and thousands more come to know Christ, each transformed into dignified, productive members of society, in turn making their OWN eternal difference in the world.
What if?
Note: Some concepts in this article were adapted from the book, When Helping Hurts by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert.
