Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Welcome to the Love Justice Podcast where we hear from different voices who are joining us in the fight against modern day slavery. Here's your host, Hannah Munn.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome to the Love justice podcast where.
[00:00:15] Speaker C: We share the ideas behind Love Justice's impactful work through conversations about fighting the world's greatest injustices. I'm your host, Hannah Munn. In this episode, I'm joined by two.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: Leaders who have helped shape Love justice.
[00:00:29] Speaker C: From its earliest days into organization it is today. Our founder and CEO John Molineau and.
[00:00:35] Speaker B: Our chief of staff, Kirk Schweitzer.
[00:00:38] Speaker C: In this conversation, we trace the evolution of Love Justice's core competency from early missionary pitfalls and cultural missteps to discovering how ownership, the right people and data driven stewardship became the engine behind intercepting over a hundred thousand individuals from trafficking.
John reflects on two decades of hard won lessons that reshaped how we understand our role across cultures. And Kirk shares how joining in 2014 placed him right at the inflection point where our model shifted from hands on western management to capacity building donors.
Together they impact what we've learned about partnering without creating dependency, navigating corruption risk, balancing accountability with local ownership, and why getting the right people, places and tools has proven to be the most strategic way to fight injustice with integrity. Let's dive in.
[00:01:42] Speaker B: Hey guys, welcome back to the Love justice podcast and we have a really exciting conversation ahead of us. Today. We get to dig into Love Justice's core competency and just get to explore a little bit more about the DNA of Love Justice. But before we do, how are you guys doing?
[00:02:00] Speaker D: Doing well. Great.
[00:02:03] Speaker B: John, why don't you kick us off here?
You have taught, you have a lot of experience serving in the kind of expat missionary space and I'd love to hear from you on how you think the role of foreign missionaries has evolved over time from the early church to the modern missions in era that we find ourselves in.
[00:02:28] Speaker E: Yeah, well, I mean there, we could do a whole, we could do an episode on this and also I'm not necessarily an expert in the whole of it of course, but like, you know, one thing that I think has, has changed it recently and, and it's, it's changed in this current era is, I mean the first generation of missionaries all over the world, they, they necessarily had to learn the language. They had to sort of, you know, in order to translate the Bible because you know, there's so many languages and there's still languages that don't have the scriptures translated, but there's few and there's almost always now some, you know, a strong church in a country or a culture that is culturally and linguistically closer to that language than Westerners are. And so, you know, when the last generation of missionaries would.
Or generations ago, they would ship their coffin over with them. When, you know, it was, it was a life commitment and it was really necessary to fully immerse themselves in the culture and language in order to translate the scriptures. Now, you know, you can fly around the world and take a week long mission trip to anywhere in the world and you can just experience it. You pop in, you pop out.
And so it's just now that there's always, there's almost always and I think actually always people who are closer, closer culturally and linguistically to any unreached people than, than anyone in our culture. It, our role has shifted and that what we, what we should do, I think it shifted in accordance with that.
[00:04:07] Speaker D: And you do. If I can jump in, you do. So many of those stories are what I think inspired so many people today.
Recognizing that shift in navigating that shift is tricky. But I think of my story going back to my mom's uncle, his name's Ed McCully and he was one of the five guys that was killed in Ecuador as they were trying to reach a previously unreached group in the Amazon jungle area.
And so I got to. My first exposure to missionary work was through that lens, was through this lens of full immersion. They landed on this beach to bring the gospel and to make contact.
And all five of these guys were killed and their wives went back in. And there's a beautiful story. I won't get into all the details of it, but that was my first introduction of like, what does it look like to follow Christ? What does it look like to bring the gospel around the world? And having joined Love justice in the last decade, seeing just a different role, my path hasn't followed. I haven't gone and landed on the beaches of whatever jungle to bring the gospel myself. But I've. I've learned that there are powerful ways to partner with existing and local churches. And that's not to say that God doesn't call people in similar ways still, but that the growth of the church around the world has changed the landscape going forward.
[00:05:30] Speaker B: Yeah, I think what people might not realize about Love justice is that we have partner staff in all of the countries that we work in that are local nationals, and then we have a team of program staff that are based in the field.
[00:05:45] Speaker C: And you know, before we maybe get.
[00:05:48] Speaker B: Into the Logistics of that and how it plays into our core competency and how it connects with this topic of missions that we're talking about. John, I think it would be appropriate to just give a little bit of context of how did Love justice start?
[00:06:01] Speaker E: Yeah, I mean, I mean, it started with a trip with four other guys. We were fresh out of college, we went to Nepal and it was kind of just like a missionary adventure tourist experience is almost how I describe it. We were there just like trying to understand and see the world and didn't really know what we wanted to do with our lives. We ended up working with street children and had our hearts broken by what we learned about their situation.
And one of the guys, Mike o', Hara, who's now the chairperson of our board, he met a man who had a vision to start a children's home. And so Mike connected with his church in Lincoln, Nebraska and they started raising money eventually for this home. And so when it was a couple years after that, Mike called me back saying, you know, I'm going back to Nepal, this home is starting. I went with him, you know, got a one way ticket, thinking I'd be home by Christmas. Got back and saw the contrast between street kids on the one hand and the kids in this wonderful home. And it was like, best thing ever, worst thing ever. And that contrast basically led me to stay.
But you know, in the beginning, you know, I was personally doing relational ministry through broken Nepali English and gestures, you know, and it didn't take me very long to realize that's not, that's not, I'm not very effective at that and that there are Nationals who can do things better than me. And so there was another missions organization who was working at that time that I was friends with a lot of their staff and they had been working with street children and they had this moment and it had people who had been there years and years and to us they were like legends, you know, and they had this moment when. And they sort of collectively came. Well, one of the kids that they had successfully helped, and I think he was the only one that they had successfully helped get off the street.
He told them the best thing you could do with those, those boys is get out of their lives. And that hit them and it hit me really hard. It was like, wow, you started to see this.
I started to learn about the many ways that I think well intentioned effort can, can do harm or not have an impact. And, and then I started as I, as I was like learning from senior missionaries and Christian leaders in the Country. I just saw how they were very. They were very cynical, doubtful, skeptical even. Even as they were encouraging. And, you know, they. They just. They all knew something like that.
[00:08:27] Speaker D: I.
[00:08:27] Speaker E: That I didn't. It took me a long time to sort of see and. And, you know, eventually I went from personally doing relational ministry to sort of managing from behind the scenes. And I would soon see that has just as many pitfalls there. There's, you know, there's so much that I didn't understand about the culture and ways that my way of doing things actually was the wrong way of doing it. And, yeah, I just started to realize that how fraught with pitfalls my involvement really was.
[00:08:56] Speaker B: Yeah, so you talk about the start in relational ministry and then moving towards more management.
At what point did you start to realize that more oversight wasn't actually producing more excellence?
[00:09:11] Speaker E: Well, I mean, I was making every mistake under the sun.
You know, it was a very, you know, heavy, steep learning curve. And I was learning about, like, how common corruption, abuse, and learned disempowerment were. How easy it is to think that you understand something only to learn that you've had the wool pulled over your eyes.
And, you know, so. But I saw that there was a real need for national ownership, but we needed the right nationals to actually own it and believe it. And if you had them, it's like we didn't even need to be there. We didn't need to do anything.
The right people can be so effective. And so I started asking the question, what is our role if the right nationals are so much more effective than us?
But as Westerners, we had access to money, so that was certainly one part of. It would be a lot easier to raise money in the United States than in Nepal.
But then I remember when I wrote our Children Home Standard, and I did a lot of research about developmental science, and I learned about parenting practices and worked with local experts or international experts and developed this Children Home Standard. It was a guidebook about how we wanted our homes to operate. And I think that was the first thing where I don't know that any of our great nationals would have been able to do that.
And it was something that I was able to do, and that was helpful. But then at first I was like, okay, the Children Home Standard has been written. You know, it's.
It's. Now they'll just implement it. But of course, you know, it's a complex document with all these different things that we're asking them to do. You need to have systems in place to ensure that you're following up. And so I sort of, sort of started thinking about how do we follow up with all these things? And we have all these homes and we want to make sure each of these things is happening. And so I developed, we developed a tool called Operations Dashboard. We still use it that helps our national office make sure they're tracking and compliance on all the issues that are, that the, our homes are supposed to do so. And around this time I also met my wife Akshaya who she's Nepali and she understood of course, Nepal and Nepali culture. And she had a very different perspective than me on a lot of things and really helped me kind of understand how little I knew. She kind of helped me understand how little I understood, how prone I was to misunderstanding. It just gave me a strong, I guess a strong insight into my own blindness in the ways that it was really, it was so easy for the wool to be pulled over my eyes.
[00:11:42] Speaker B: Yeah. John, for people who aren't familiar with maybe the, the landscape of the expat missionary culture, can you just really quickly share a little bit more about what you mean by learned disempowerment?
How common corruption is like those aren't the types of things I think most people would be aware of when they think about that. So really quickly before we move on, just share a little bit more for people who aren't familiar.
[00:12:13] Speaker E: Well, I mean, one example of learned disempowerment that ties to what I was just saying is, is when the organization that I, that I was, I talked about earlier when that, that child that they'd help get off the street told them that the best thing they could do is get out of those, those kids lives. That was sort of the sort of learned disempowerment. You know, like the, the what, what happened at that time in Kathmandu is there's a lot of children on the streets near a tourist area and there's a lot of tourists coming through, including missionary tourism and non missionary tourism. And everybody sees the street kids and it's like, wow, let's who are these street kids? And it was, and then they work with them and they try to give them books and they start a drop in center and they take them out to meals and they buy them shoes and they, and so it was incentivizing them to be on the street.
It was literally a pull factor to, to pull kids on the street. And so when you take somebody that can do something themselves and you just start giving them fish, you know, and then they're going to, okay, I can, I can just go to this person for fish, and then they almost like they don't see the need to learn to fish, maybe as long as you're just there providing fish. And so you can literally, by trying to help someone, you can actually. You can in some cases actually cause them to be disempowered.
[00:13:28] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think you guys learned that in a really unique way, because in the early days of Love justice, you were going and interacting with street children and really wanting to figure out a resolution to that. And in the process realizing people were not wanting to be assisted in the ways that you were trying to cultivate, because, you know, in some ways it was better off for them to be on the streets or they were making more money or xyz. And so that isn't, you know, something that people who haven't spent time in the country working with local nationals can really understand, which I think is. Is really important. From 2012 to 2015, the expat team grew from one staff. You to 20. How did that transition play out and shape our thinking about what role. What our role should be in countries and cultures we work in?
[00:14:22] Speaker E: Yeah, well, it started because we got featured in the Passion Worship conference, and suddenly we had so many applicants, and we were just flooded with applicants. And soon we had a lot of people raising support and on the way. And, you know, we went through one from one to 20 in about three years. And so suddenly we just had this great team of eager, passionate people. But they came with a very, you know, and I had been in Nepal, you know, eight years in, at 2012. And, you know, we. We had this team that just had very different ideas about what our role should be. They had different pictures in their mind, you know, and, and so. But I was also kind of wrestling with the concept of founder S syndrome, where the founder holds on everything so tight and, and ruins it. And realizing that's. That's a risk here, I. I might do that. And seeing the ways that I didn't want to let go of things that are. Let go of control. And so I'm, I'm. I had to really try to distinguish where are the areas or what are the ways. I'm just not wanting to let control over something I built. And where is it that I'm. I'm just wanting to pass the things on that I've learned.
And I had a moment.
It was.
There was a time when it just occurred to me if I don't really try to admit my weaknesses really well here, if I'm. If I don't really face up to the possibility that I could be wrong about things. Then I'm going to ruin everything. And so I started to really internalize this idea of admitting our weaknesses, even while I'm wanting to try to share what I've learned. And so, you know, we developed a training material. It's called the Culture module. Kind of tried to explain those things that I'd learned, and it would. What I found is there was things that you have to learn by.
By doing it, you know, like you can tell someone. You can tell someone, but until they make the mistake themselves and they see it, they maybe don't believe it, and. But you don't want people to come and use making mistakes that. That could mess with people's lives as a training ground. And so it was. It was designed, you know, with. With all these scenarios based on many situations where I. From my Western frame of mind, or by failing to understand something about the culture, caused me to make a decision that played out very differently than I would have expected.
You would put someone in that role and you would say, so what would you do? Here's what, you know, here's what's happening. And it would sort of simulate having to make the decisions in response to circumstances and just find out how it played out.
And the idea is just to cut down that learning curve so people don't have to make mistakes in ways that impact people's lives. And I think that was a bit of a turning point. I remember at the meeting when we gave that training, there was, I think, a real sense of kind of unity and understanding and breakthrough in that. And eventually I started feeling like I could really let go of things. And Kirk was a part of that journey. Number of our leaders around that time just started stepping up and taking on more and more.
[00:17:11] Speaker D: Yeah.
[00:17:12] Speaker B: And Kirk, you are part of. You were one of those 20. So where did you come in in this story?
[00:17:21] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah. So I. It's. It's great to kind of relive and listen to this. This history here.
When we. And I'll comment on a couple things John shared. When we released that Culture module, it wasn't like, from then on, you know, we were golden. It was more like in the next iteration of that Culture module, my mistakes were now written into that module because we can, you know, and so it's been kind of this continual learning. But that was. That definitely was a transition point. And I think of it, John, you said this, but I. And I want to just underscore it, and you've said it in the past and it has stuck out to me. And I think you've said something like in your two decades of living in Nepal, the one thing that you've learned or kind of the most important thing you've learned is how little you know. And that's really confronting. That's not the story you hear from most people coming back from two decades of living overseas in whatever country. I've never heard that before. In fact, I've never heard that idea. So I just wanted to pause on that because that idea is so different than what you do growing up in the States. You do hear people come back and they've learned the language, they're maybe wearing some local cultural dress. You have this sense of like, wow, they get it. They like they live there, like they're speaking like they get it. They know the. And so that for our team of expats, those excited, eager expats that are coming in, they, you know, they read whatever book and not to diminish those books again, I love those books and I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for those experiences and learning about, you know, what, what the missions field looked like decades ago.
But it, the way that we're working is quite different. And so that when with that being your predominant lesson that you're sharing that culture module, being able to spell out the different pitfalls in detail, that you felt that really, that really was the bridge between kind of this philosophy that was rubbing up against all these new expats that were joining and really I think connected the dots where it's like, okay, that makes sense. The reason you're saying that is because of all 30 of these different issues that you've kind of walked through in these pitfalls that you've fallen into. And as I said, it didn't mean that we never fall into pitfalls. We continue to fall into pitfalls, but we continue to learn together.
So yeah, I joined about 10 years ago and just in the midst of kind of these lessons and learnings. At that time we were just working within our anti trafficking work along the Nepal India border.
And at the time that we were really realizing that we needed to make this shift kind of away from direct, kind of more close management of the work that was going on primarily in Nepal at that time, more towards a, like a capacity building donor where we could think about, as John said, there were that early example of putting together the children's home standard. What did that look like in different spaces? Eventually we would develop a transit monitoring Standard.
Now in the case of the transit monitoring standard, what, what we developed there was largely the lessons that we just collected from our partners on the ground. It wasn't like we said, hey, we'll have a think about this and come back and just delivered it. It was more like we collected all of the lessons about best practices, about how transit monitoring worked effectively, mostly border monitoring at that time we just collected it all, organized it, and then, and then sent it back out. And now we continue to use a document like that with all of our fields, all, well, 20 or so of the fields that we've worked in.
And so that's just, that's, that's one other example of a tool in a way that we're able to then just build capacity but step into a different role. It was around this time that kind of the first vision for what we call field core processes and in a way to track the installation of our field core processes around the world was, was first developed and kind of envisioned.
And the basic idea was why don't we break down all of the different tools that we're using, whether it be our transit market monitoring standard or our intercept record form. The form that's, that's, that documents every single intercept that we make. Or you know, there's, there's finance tools, there's HR tools, there's operations management tools, but everyone is broken down specifically and it's documented and then we track the installation across all of our countries.
I could go into a lot more detail, I'll spare you, but that's, that's the general idea and that's what set up the framework then for us to be able to say, okay, here are the tools and the processes that we need to just continue to improve over time. And here's a way to track that at scale.
And so I think that really shifted then the direction we were able to move towards and eventually we'd later refine our core competency to searching out the people, places and tools to maximize mission impact.
Searching out the people, places and tools to maximize, maximize mission impact. We needed that. We recognize that we as an organization in deciding who to partner with, had an important role to find the right people. Typically when we, when we're starting a new location, that's a champion, that's a volunteer leader that would, would eventually become likely chairperson of a border else already leading organization. So searching at the right people, places, choosing where, choosing where. We've often talked about how it's our role as an organization lji to search out the least of these because it's not as obvious we have to find them. And so choosing the right places and locations and tools to maximize mission impact, those tools are what we define as our field core processes. It's tools like that, children's home standard tools like the transit monitoring standard or our intercept record form those tools, then we can share with our partners, adapt them for local context, and continue to collaborate and install those over time.
[00:23:10] Speaker B: Thanks for sharing that, Kirk. John, why do you think that finding the right people is so hard and so central to what makes or breaks an organization like ours?
And maybe you could also share how we find the right people too.
[00:23:25] Speaker E: Yeah, yeah. Well, it's central because of how much better nationals are than us at everything, because they understand the culture and every situation or many situation that we just don't. You know, as, as Kirk mentioned, like, my 20 years in Nepal just taught me 20 years that I don't know what's happening. And, and I thought I did after two months, you know, and then I was like, oh, after one year I'm like, oh, wow. I now I really know. And after three years and it just, eventually I just realized I don't. And so, yeah, but it, but it's hard to find those right people because of how hard it is to make an impact compared to how common corruption, abuse, and learned disempowerment are in poor countries. When you come and you're talking about wanting to start an organization that represents a really good, big financial opportunity for people and that attracts a lot of attention. And then because of how wide the cultural gap is, it's so hard.
I have just learned not to trust my own.
My own discernment about character and about individuals. And so, so now, I mean, I mean, we have Sean Mullins, who is a Zimbabwean pastor that now lives in the uk and he was. He just really networked with Christians all over the world. And, and we go. He leads. He will find potential champions. He'll, you know, seek recommendations and start connecting with people. And just over the course of. Of several months, they'll be. He'll be sharing about love, justice, and they'll be sharing.
He'll get to know them and then also have them start exploring. Could transit monitoring work in this place? What would we need?
How would we do it? Where would we work? Can we get the permissions? And he would sort of get to know them in that way.
And then eventually he would propose a pilot plan that we tried. Small, cheap pilots that just three months to try it, see if it works.
And so that, yeah, Sean has. Part of it is. Sean's the human discernment element.
But. And part of it is just this. The you find out by trying it and that method of selecting and setting up fields, it's actually less involvement from us. Well, I mean, we still involved, but like, you know, I guess it's a lot less than moving to a country, which is what it started out as. And it works. You know, we've successfully, you know, we have a lot of pilots waiting in the wing, as you guys know, and we have just been able to replicate our program over and over again and giving us a lot of confidence in our ability to scale it.
[00:26:05] Speaker B: Yeah, I think something else just to supplement what has already been said is that, you know, in the beginning we were trying to hire expat missionaries to go serve in the different countries that we were working in and it just wasn't working. We weren't finding people.
We all know that it can be a little bit of a revolving door because of just the hardships and the support raising, you know, XYZ of. Of what it takes to have someone in the field long term. And it was because those things weren't working that you. And also these lessons that you were learning parallel to that that then led towards, you know, okay, let's find the right people and give them the tools. And then our role is developing those tools and helping facilitate that. But I think this of begs the question of how do we at love, justice, balance Western accountability with local ownership without falling back into micromanagement or enabling dysfunction? Kirk, I think this question's for you.
[00:27:09] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah. And as we all know, we've had so many conversations on this topic over, over the years and just finding that balance, it wasn't, it was in no way a balance that we just arrived at immediately. And we still, I think, continue to feel that tension and try and adjust as, as we feel that tension. So. But a couple things I would say is we, we have an mou. Every partner that we work with, in every country that we work with. One of the first steps, as John described, that champion recruitment process that Sean leads, part of that is, is signing an mou, which, which is there to. Is there to spell out in and really kind of outline the roles, the roles that we see in regards to our core competency and the role of our partners to locally own it, to create impact using and adapting the tools that we've created. And so I think that goes a long way.
I know as, again, as John shared about that champion onboarding process, really honoring them in their role and in describing their role, in not minimizing their role, but describing and similarly describing our team as a team that's meant to come alongside and give them the tools that they need.
We go a bit further towards local ownership with our subcommittee model. With all of our work around the world, we've designed it to be led by local subcommittees. This connects to one of our core values to be the kingdom and is one of the primary ways that we, we live out that value by setting up local church subcommittees to oversee the work. It's one thing to have it be owned by a local partner in a country, but even more so we want to find local churches to say, hey, we're going to help lead this border monitoring station or this transit monitoring station.
We want to be a part of this impact because we've recognized the best case scenario is we find churches that have had a heart to fight against injustice, but they just haven't known how. Maybe they haven't had the tools or maybe the right idea, or maybe they already are, maybe they're already running with different ideas, but this is an idea to supplement that. And so they get involved to help oversee our monitors. Then on the ground that local oversight, I can't speak more of that. And yet in our MoU and in the way that we work with our partners, we do have an understanding about how finances work, how budget requests work, how you know, entering data into our custom database because that's important us for us to learn to grow. And so there's, there's things that we would expect our partners to continue and remain in compliance in. And so we monitor those things, we track those and we make them very clear so that there's not surprises along the way.
And the last thing I would say in response to your question, Hannah, is we, we've shifted away from this idea that we as, as foreigners are going to manage any work that is going on kind of on the ground that is not in our vocabulary anymore. And the word we've shifted to is stewardship. This idea that we are helping to steward regions or countries. And there's a role within our anti trafficking work called a regional steward. Somebody that is there to come alongside and to work with those national leaders and support them, to guide them, to help make that handoff of the tools that we've been talking about. But they're explicitly not regional directors, which, which might be more the norm in international work. They're regional stewards. It's not, this is not Work that we are owning, it is work that we are stewarding.
[00:30:44] Speaker B: What I think is so important to understand in the. In the background of all of this is that we didn't start Love justice with all of these things in mind or the strategy in place. It was all like each thing, the MoU, the stewardship, the compliance, was in response to learning. Yet again, there's so much that we don't know, and we could be doing this better.
And it was like really just one step at a time that just kind of cascaded one right after the other, which I think is just important as people are hearing this and hearing our story and hearing about how it's evolved over the last 20 years. It all didn't happen at once. It was almost like we learn from our weaknesses, we learn from our mistakes, we learn from our partners and the feedback and postured ourselves to hear their feedback too, to be honest. And it's just refined and sharpened that core competency, you know, year after year after year. And we're still. We're still learning and still implementing new things based off of. Of that.
John, it's been said that we're not just scaling operations, we're scaling impact, and we're doing it with integrity. I'm specifically thinking about impact verification. When I say integrity.
What makes that distinction between scaling impact and scaling operations so critical?
[00:32:10] Speaker E: Well, first of all, you have to choose specifically impact.
You have to sort of recognize that impact should be the main thing, because love cares about impact. Because if it was me or my loved ones who are in. In a difficult situation, the only thing I would really care about is impact. And so, yeah, the emphasis on impact is tremendously important. And then. And then it's really been really important. It's important to what you just said, Hannah. You have to admit your weaknesses. You have to realize you have them. You always have them. Like, they're not a year goes by when we don't realize there's something that we're doing that. That was just crazy that we were doing it that way before. And we needed to. You know, we just had a huge blindness that was making us not see something, you know, so. So you have to have this sort of admit your weaknesses in order to be dedicated to, like, continual improvement. You can't continually improve if you. If you're not continually seeking out the ways you need to improve. And we have a bias about our own impact.
You know, we. We want that impact to be real. We feel proud of it. We feel happy when we have it. And, you know, We've, we've stood in front of people and talked about it and we've taken money from donors to accomplish it. And so we of course want it to be real. We have a bias, but that bias is, can become a blindness.
And so yeah, but you know, we say define, measure and allocate by impact. Once you have a way of defining your impact, you just need to be measuring it. You need to be, you know, putting your resources where more to the places that have greater impact and the less to the places that have less. And so, but part of the organization needs to push to scale and maximize impact even as another part of the organization needs to be really skeptical and stingy about counting it. And so that, that, you know, that for us that's verification. We have intercept verification process where, where multiple staff are involved in ensuring that, that each intercept that we count meets our standards of, of what counts as impact. And so that happened kind of naturally at Love justice because of a lot of the people we have, including both of you and including John Hudlow, previous staff, Mike o', Hara, our chairperson. We just have a lot of really fair minded people who are able to be pretty skeptical about our impact. And so that, yeah, at the times when some of that push was happening, I was more on the. No, but it is, you know, it is. The impact is real. Impact was great. But eventually I saw like that is so important to, that we counter our own natural impact bias. And so you need all of those things. The choice for impact, the submitting your weaknesses, you need the idea that you allocate by impact. You need to push back.
And honestly when we kind of restructured around all these ideas, that's when we really figured out how to scale impact and to maximize impact. And a key part of this is, I mean the one part of it that we didn't have to figure out ourselves.
Sort of all the tools of science and business, you know, and I, when I started out, I think I would have thought like tools of science and business. What does that have to do with the kingdom? You know, like I saw that as very antithetical to the way God calls us to. And, and eventually when you get to the point of trying to scale impact, you need those and they, they exist and they've been developed and you need to really find out what, what works and what's effective. And so.
[00:35:40] Speaker B: Yeah, this question also makes me think back to the very early days of our expansion, which would have been around 2018, 2019. And I remember our goal for 2020 was to be in 20 countries. I think it was 20 countries by 2020.
And that was kind of the push of scaling operations. Right. Like I don't think we had the language at that point or it wasn't as sharp as it is now around impact. And I think that there was a place for that in our history and in our story where it pushed us out of our comfort zone to get into as many countries as we could.
But then what we've done since then is almost gone down in country count because we're finding the most impactful countries and instead of allocating resources just to scale operations, we're actually allocating it to fields that have gotten impact, have proven faithful with that, faithful with the execution of the tools and the resources that we're giving them and we're giving them more. And that's just a very tangible example of that allocating by impact of what it actually means. It might mean we're not piloting or continue to fund our work in specific country because we have a country where there's more opportunity. And ideally we're piloting and allocating by impact with our current countries at the same time.
Um, but that just, just to say how we even got to that point of prioritizing impact rather than scaling operations, which I think is, is really unique and just a, a neat part of our story.
[00:37:16] Speaker E: Yeah. So if I could just say that like I remember when we first, it was before we did 20, by 2020, we, we made a goal to be in 10 countries at a time when we were in like two or three and had a lot of failed attempts to expand.
And I remember thinking like there's no way that's, it seemed so hard that we could, I think it was 20 countries in five years and, and it seemed like it seemed really, really difficult and I was not sure if we would be able to do that. But the reason we got to that point is because what was happening is we had already, when our budget had grown like four or five fold and our impact was flat, we'd already picked the low hanging fruit in Nepal. So if we, we realized and if we want to have more and more impact on the dollar, we need to figure out how to scale this and make it work in other places.
And eventually we did and figured out how to scale. Now we definitely, I mean we could, we could probably start 10 or 20 countries within a couple of months or within a few months if we had the resources to do it. And now I think they would be pretty impactful. But as you know, as you guys know, our listeners might not know this right now, this year the focus is not just on more and more intercepts. We just crossed 100,000 intercepts, praise God. But, but it's on the quality of him in of intercepts. You know that every, not every intercept is different and not every intercept is the same. Everyone is different. And so we found we've created a way for scoring essentially the quality of each intercept and in terms of how likely, how certain it is to be trafficking, is there a trafficker arrested that, that kind of thing. And, and I think that we may even have, we may, we've gone from countries to then to intercepts and maximize that. Now it's just making the biggest difference that we possibly can. That's it always comes down to having the greatest impact that we can.
[00:39:04] Speaker B: So yeah, and even thinking about those early days of piloting in new countries, it just took a really long time to get impact.
And, and I think about that compared to last week we had a team in Senegal launching a pilot there. They had five intercepts and an arrest their first week. And it's because of all this sharpening and because of all this honing in.
And it also connects with John, one of our kind of end of the year messages, which is that it took us 20 years to get to that hundred thousand intercept milestone.
We're not a new organization.
I think we're, you know, not a lot of people, we're not a household name. But we're also not new. We've been around for a really long time. And even though it took us 20 years to get to 100,000 intercepts, we're estimating that it'll be take us about between three to four years to get the next a hundred thousand because of all the sharpening, because of all the honing and because of the admitting our weaknesses, learning from it. Like now we have something that works and we're ready to, we're ready to go.
And so that's just been a key kind of concept that we've been talking about internally for the last couple of weeks. Anything either of you guys would add there?
[00:40:17] Speaker E: I mean, just our champion recruitment team. That's what they do. That's their job. They find they've got tons of champions that are waiting in the wings and they've been developing relationships over years. They have those lined up and our installation teams. For them to go into a country and do all the things that are needed to do to get a transit monitoring pilot up and running, they know how to do that.
They've done it many, many times. And so it's almost like clockwork, you know, and when I compare that to the way that I remember the first time I went to Bangladesh, or when we tried to get our work really off the ground in India, or, you know, Kirk, I think you were there for one of the early trips to Bangladesh and Thailand. You know, like, it was. It was just a very different experience than when we kind of really restructured around our core competency again, that.
[00:41:08] Speaker B: That.
[00:41:09] Speaker E: That paved the way for us to learn how to scale.
[00:41:13] Speaker D: I was just going to say that when we, as we look and reflect on our impact over the last 10, 20 years, the best word to describe it is exponential. And we say that, you know, understanding how aggressive the curve of an exponential line becomes eventually, you know, we've been pretty hesitant to stamp that on, but that has been the best.
That's been the best line, the best understanding of what we can accomplish over the last few years as we've seen our impact grow, and particularly our intercepts grow over the years. And so it's been so exciting to see that and watch that and grow and just excited to see where it goes from here.
[00:41:54] Speaker B: Yeah. So as we, as we wrap up this conversation, I think this is a really fun question, and we'll start with you, John, and then Kirk will give you an opportunity to also respond. But when you guys look, look back on the Love justice journey, your journey, our journey through Nepal, the creation of field core processes, and just the idea of kingdom class excellence, what do you think God's trying to teach us?
[00:42:22] Speaker E: Well, I would summarize it something. I would say something like. Like, love cares about impact, and everything else follows from that.
Because if you do care about impact, then of course, you need to get your role right and do what you do best and let those nationals who know how to do their role best do that. And of course, you need to be very intentional to do no harm. So you need to understand the pitfalls and ways you can do harm, and you need to work with the right nationals to figure out what actions have an impact and how do you scale that. And to do that, you need to admit your weaknesses. You need to get your impact bias out of it. You need to be skeptical.
And Lovejoy's had a lot of programs over the years, but there's only one that we're actively scaling, and that's because we found that one strategy where $112 can intercept someone to prevent them from being trafficked. And we have always believed that if we go out, we identify the most strategic points to disrupt the flow of human trafficking. You set up and start questioning people, looking for signs of trafficking and intercepting individuals, seeing traffickers arrested, then that changes the risk re calculation for traffic traffickers. So that $112 intercept has a disruptive preventative effect that reduces trafficking beyond that one person. And, and we've learned how to scale it and we're planning to, to do so to drive the downfall of slavery in the places where it's most rampant.
[00:43:50] Speaker B: Kirk, what about you? What do you think God's trying to teach us through, through all this?
[00:43:56] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah, I love, I love this. I love the theme of admitting our and our weaknesses.
Part of my role is to oversee this, this improvement framework of all of our core processes. And so I love to talk about that and I always love to just view any one of those core processes like it's just part way there. We have so much room to grow. There's so like John said, we will continually look back and be like, I cannot believe we used to do it that way. That seems crazy. And there are, there are things we're doing now that are like that and I can't wait to, to figure out what they are.
But what I've realized, and largely through John's leadership in this, is that you don't get to a place where organizationally you're not afraid to admit your weaknesses. If you don't have people within the organization individually that aren't afraid to admit their own personal weaknesses. I think those two are really connected and we've just seen how challenging it is for us. And I'll even say me to admit my own weaknesses. And so it's one thing to kind of say on a high level, yeah, we've got weaknesses as an organization, we're going to fix them, we're going to get there. We love improvement. But it's another thing to say, hey, I actually, as I'm coming into a team saying, I've got weaknesses here, there's a team here. But I bring weaknesses to the table and I bring blindnesses to the table. And just those conversations are difficult to work through those. But I've been so edified in a culture that, that craves that, and in a culture where there's a safe place to come to a table like that is we're thinking about ideas to fight against injustice, to benefit the least of these around the world. How important it has been for me to admit my own weaknesses and sin and blindnesses in order to Come to that table and be effective.
[00:45:41] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. And John, I think you've done a really good job of modeling, like Kirk said, modeling that, fighting for that, creating a space where it's not embarrassing, shameful, like all these negative associations. I think that people can think of when you think about admitting your weaknesses, but rather this idea that it's actually one of the greatest gifts that other people can give to you is speaking into that.
And one of the best ways that we can, I think, just posture ourselves before God. And I think of the scripture, like, in our weakness, he's made strong, or in our own weakness, we're also strong because of Christ in us.
Guys, just to. To end off, I just think about the richness of, of the last 45 minutes. And John, I think you've had the privilege of meeting with even some people who listen to this podcast regularly, whether it's people who are exploring possible employment with Love Justice. I've had candidates reach out talking about the podcast donors, potential donors who are really invested in impact and really wanting to make a difference, and also people that just care about justice work. If you were to summarize, like, what's one thing you hope they take away from this conversation, what would it be?
[00:47:00] Speaker E: Well, right now I'm just thinking about, well, okay, choose impact. That I never want to. And you know, like, it's so.
It's so obvious that you should choose impact, but it is so commonly overlooked or under emphasized. And so whatever anyone does with their lives, I mean, we're created to do good. We're created to have an impact, to make an impact in people's lives. And every person, I think, is called specifically to try to live their life in such a way as to make the greatest impact. And that can look all sorts of different ways. But impact is really doing things that bless and love people. Well, the things that you would want if you were in their role. That's what impact is.
But I am. But they hold. Admit your wicked weaknesses thing. That's a super important thing. Yeah, you know, you. You lose it. You.
You lose everything you gain when you, when you don't admit your weaknesses. You know, like the one, you can be great in nine ways. In the tenth, you could. It will ruin the other nine, you know, and so, and you know, it. It feels. It's one of those things that feels scary and is easy.
So there's something inside us that we. That, that wants to. That recoils against the prospect of admitting our weaknesses. To treat it like it's. It's poison.
And in reality, it's the cure.
[00:48:19] Speaker B: Yeah, I feel like that could be a whole other podcast episode. John, what were you going to say?
[00:48:25] Speaker D: Kirk? I would say admitting your weaknesses is one. You said one is choose impact. But I would. I would say or argue that you can actually do that if you're not. I mean, you can. You can think that intellectually, like, yeah, I'm choosing, but if you're not actually willing to admit your weaknesses to kind of see the real truth of the matter, you can't. You're not in a position to choose impact.
[00:48:44] Speaker E: No, you'll just end up choosing the exaggeration, you know, the exaggerate exaggeration about your own impact. And. And so you do have. Yeah, they do go hand in hand. And so it is with every improvement and every way, you know, like, pride and the lack of admitting our weaknesses, you know, like, ruins everything, you know?
[00:49:03] Speaker B: Well, thank you guys so much for taking the time today, and, yeah, just really appreciate. Really appreciate this conversation.
[00:49:11] Speaker E: All right, thank you, Hannah. Thank you, Kirk.
[00:49:16] Speaker A: We are grateful for the generous support of the Love justice community. Please consider joining our family of donors. Learn more at lovejustice ngo.
