In When Helping Hurts, Brian Fikkert writes, “Development is not done to people or for people, but with people.” He talks a lot about savings groups as an example of good “with” type development. Our friends John and Kate Marsden [...]
In seminary I had a professor that compared our course work to that of drinking from a fire hydrant. You catch what you can and let the rest flow by. To some degree, that is how When Helping Hurts, was [...]
In the second half of chapter 11 of When Helping Hurts, the authors give some practical advice for effectively partnering with communities in the majority world. We love their suggestions. We asked our friend Celeste Brown de Mercado to add [...]
I remember about 8 years ago sitting in a Chipotle restaurant with a group of friends after church. We were talking, when a gentleman walked in and asked for money. He said something about his car being broken down on [...]
There was a pastor that had worked at a small rural church for many years. During his time there, he had requested from the congregation numerous times the possibility of moving the piano from one side of the platform to [...]
We’ve made it to part four of the book. I, for one, am completely thrilled that Brian Fikkert and Steve Corbett added this section. If you only have the first edition then it’s worth getting the second edition to get [...]
Chapter 8 of When Helping Hurts begins to look at how we can effectively engage with people who are experiencing poverty in North America. Fikkert points out: For the first time in history, more poor people live in the suburbs [...]
In the book The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg, tells the story of Travis Leach. The summarised version is that Travis had a challenging upbringing. He first saw his father overdose when he was nine. He grew up in a [...]
Though poverty is often seen through the eyes of the homeless or unemployed there are many hard working people in our nation struggling to stay afloat. They are called the “working poor.” The working poor can be defined as: People [...]
Short-term missions (STM) trips. What does that phrase bring to your mind? For most that phrase brings back memories of sleeping under mosquito nets, eating unknown foods and being pricked with immunizations for diseases that sound very scary. (gamma goblin [...]
