Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Hey, everyone.
Welcome to the Love Justice Podcast, where we share insights behind real impact in the fight against human trafficking. Today, we are exploring how sustainable justice depends on the right local leaders. And we have two really great guests with us. First, we have John Molyneux, founder and CEO of Love justice, who has lived and worked in the field for over 20 years.
And we also have Sean Mullins, director of Champion Recruitment at Love justice, who was born in the UK but raised in Zimbabwe, and who brings decades of cross cultural leadership experience.
Together, these guys are going to give us a behind the scenes look at what it really takes to entrust the faithful and ensure the work can outlast any one leader any season, or any expat.
John and Sean, welcome back to the Love Justice Podcast.
[00:00:56] Speaker B: Thank you, thank you.
[00:00:57] Speaker C: Glad to be here.
[00:00:59] Speaker A: What a. What a line. John and Sean, you guys are our dynamic duo for the day.
John, I want to start by just sharing something that we talk a lot about at Love justice, and that is an awareness of the cultural gap between our culture, both the Love justice culture and the Western culture, and the cultures that we're working with, how it's wider than we think, how we need to find the right nationals to be effective in our work and avoid doing harm. I'd love for you to just start this conversation off by telling us a little bit more about the gap, why it's unavoidable and why we believe it's worth the effort to overcome it.
[00:01:49] Speaker C: Yeah. Thank you.
Well, I mean, living in Nepal for 20 years and it's probably help that I'm married to a Nepali.
It has just led me to this understanding that that gap is really wide.
And I've kind of had the experience again and again of thinking I understand a situation or a local reality and being wrong.
And it's often because I missed some baseline reality on the ground that I didn't understand.
But some of the injustice that we fight can exist and persist because of cultural differences.
Those are real. And there could be good and bad in culture.
So, I mean, some cultures practice child sacrifice.
Some cultures do a really good job of protecting the vulnerable, some don't.
And some tell the truth in public. Some normalize deception. You know, some really reward merit and diligence, and some reward corruption and favoritism.
Some resolve conflict through, you know, impartial processes, some through violence and intimidation. And, you know, some cultivate stable families. Some neglect or destabilize them. Some encourage honest enterprise. Some thrive on theft or coercion. And, you know, some honor human dignity regardless of stature.
Some treat lives as expendable.
And so there's all these ways that cultures vary widely and the variance is really big, it's really wide. And so it's almost shockingly wide from culture to culture. And so if we care about doing good, and we care about protecting the vulnerable and bringing justice, we can't pretend that all cultures are equal. There is good and bad in culture. And so protecting the vulnerable has to begin with rejecting the cultural relativism that is the default assumption of the 21st century postmodernism.
Protecting the vulnerable means rejecting cultural tendencies that do the opposite. And so at the same time, some of the most vulnerable people in the world are the people who inherited some of those opposite cultural traits. And, you know, people's cultural inheritance is not a matter of blame or merit. We all inherit our cultures, so we shouldn't blame or give or claim credit for our cultural inheritance. But we all have a responsibility to decide what do we want to accept or reject from our culture.
As humans, we're called to be culture makers. We have to decide which elements of our inherited cultures we want to accept and pass down, and what we want to reject, resist, or cut off. And those are decisions that will ultimately define the legacy of each of our lives.
[00:04:43] Speaker A: Yeah, and I think, you know, one of the reasons why we chose to highlight this topic specifically is because of the scalability of transit monitoring, the scalability of our model, and how this has been probably one of the most breakthrough strategies in that model to ensure the success of the scalability of transit monitoring. And so, John, I think it would be helpful for people who have a light introduction to Love justice, or even if they've been following Love justice for a really long time. How do we practically navigate the gap, the culture gap, and maybe specifically why you found it to be really important in our work?
[00:05:33] Speaker C: Yeah, so I mean, during my entire time at Love Justice, I've just been constantly navigating like these culture clashes situations where one culture says we should handle this thing in this way and another culture says in that way.
And I've been in situations where something really seemed wrong to me about the way another culture wanted to handle a situation, only to find out later that it was because of some reality on the ground that I didn't understand. And maybe they didn't have words to sometimes so complex, they, they've taken it for granted, but there is a reason behind it.
And you have to just kind of stay in these long, slow, often painful back and forth conversations about what is right and what should we do here? And so I've probably turned out to be wrong because I was missing reality on the ground more often than I have been right. Because my culture's way of doing things was right. And so, yeah, it's just a really important issue that we have to figure out how to navigate really well. And I don't know that we have it perfect. But I have learned having the right nationals and really just entrusting them is the key.
[00:06:47] Speaker A: Yeah, John, I'm having a thought because we've been talking a lot internally at LEP justice about we just passed a major milestone, which was the 100,000 intercepts and how it took us nearly 20 years to get the a hundred thousand intercepts. But yet we're estimating that it'll take us about three, three and a half years to get the next a hundred thousand.
I think what's important to highlight and maybe like a hypothesis I'm also sharing at the same time, is that what you're talking about, like, bridging the gap between cultures takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of dialect. It takes more than what people probably really fully understand. And it requires a lot of patience of, like, we really gotta get in sync. We really gotta get on the same page. And I wonder if, you know, the 20 years of getting to that a hundred thousand encompasses, like, the work that we did to get there. But then once you put in the time to get there and to get in sync, to get on the same page, to find the right local nationals to have those arduous conversations, it then breaks away for then the really quick impact that I think we're seeing. I'm just curious if you have a thought on that or if you're like, yeah, that. That resonates.
[00:08:03] Speaker C: Yeah. I mean, we. We've intercepted more people in the last 27 months than in the last. Than in the prior 18 years, you know, so that tells you a little bit about how our impact has been recently growing. And one way to say it is. I don't like the. The largest number of intercepts we had in a year prior to 2021 was less than 2,000 intercepts in a year. And so we were around 150, maybe sometimes 200.
And it was. It wasn't too long ago, but it must have been 2021 when we hit 400 in one month. And it was like this amazing milestone.
But, you know, so 2022, we intercept almost 10,000. 2023, almost 17,000. 2024, almost 22,000. 2025, almost 27,000. So the number is like our impact is growing exponentially and 100%. What I attribute that to is when we restructured around our core competency. And that is what defines what we as lovejustice International should do relative to our national partners. And that is searching out the people, places and tools to maximize mission impact. And so finding those right people and empowering them and just getting out of the way, but then giving them the right tools. And our focus is on the tools and searching out those right people in places. Their focus is on actually doing the work that way works. And it's the difference between 27,000 intercepts in a year and, you know, much less than that, I would say.
[00:09:39] Speaker A: Yeah. And around the time that we were honing in on that core competency was also when Sean join the team. And I think in a lot of ways, like, Sean was the breakthrough piece of like, how do we find the right local nationals? In fact, we had had several people involved in that prior and just felt like we kept hitting a wall or we couldn't. We weren't finding people.
And then we found Sean. And Sean, you can share a little bit about, you know, how Love justice found you, but I would love for you to just share and talk a little bit about just what your role is, what you do for Love Justice. Like, you know, not a lot of other organizations have a director of champion recruitment. What's a champion?
And just from your vantage point in finding the right local nationals.
Well, maybe first, before I'll dig into that second question in just a second, let's give a chance for listeners, just hear about you, what you do, and then I'll follow up the question of, like, what does that actually look like?
[00:10:35] Speaker B: Yeah, well, it is such a joy to work with an organization like Love justice who are passionate about fighting injustice and as John says, our core competency to, you know, to find the right people in the right places and to find those right places and then introduce them to create and the best tools for mission impact. And one of my passions is people. I love people. I love anthropology in a way, and in learning different cultures and.
And what makes people tick. And so my role essentially at Love justice is champion recruitment. Finding the right people is using our tools to find the right people in the countries that we're exploring expansion in where there is a great prevalence of the injustice, particularly of human trafficking. And so, yeah, I love looking for the right partners and helping onboard them to help them understand our mission values and then supporting them, supporting faithful national Leaders who are well respected in their countries. And we call these national leaders champions, champions fighting against injustice.
And these are champions who lead and govern and advance our shared mission in their local context in their countries. And as John mentioned, you know, the complexity of cultures and the differences and navigating those, that's one of the passions that I have is learning some of those complexities and working together with like minded people who share our vision and values and helping them to work through that and fight injustice in their context. So that's what I'm passionate about. That's why I love working at Love Justice. I love what I do and love finding these new and different partners that we can work together with to fight injustice as we share the love of Jesus, you know, people who, who love Jesus. And that's what we're about, you know, so.
[00:12:33] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And John, what was it like, aside from Sean's like, obvious passion? You can hear it in his voice, you can see it in his demeanor. Like he just exudes this, this passion for exactly what he's talking about.
Like, why, what made Sean like the guy? Like, I, I know that he had a lot of connection. Like a lot of connections. He was, you know, in the right spaces. Like, there was something about Sean that like, it just exploded when we brought him on the team. And I'm just curious if you could take a second to be like, what, what, like, what was Sean's secret sauce that made him the guy for this job?
[00:13:07] Speaker C: Yeah, well, I'll, I'm going to answer this in a completely unedited way and then we can edit, we can edit the answers later if Sean would prefer that. But. So the first time I met Sean, it was the first time I went to Zimbabwe. He was, and we were just like, we were actually planning to go to, not Harare, but where, I can't remember, was it.
Yeah, yeah.
And then at the last minute we shifted to going to Harare and so we didn't have any contacts. We were like scrambling to scrape together contacts, you know, like, and people we could get in touch with. And Sean was one of the people that ended up at a, you know, at a table at a restaurant, you know, like, and, and I was very impressed with, with Sean. Sean has a way interpersonally that is really phenomenal. Like, I remember just connecting with him and just seeing the way he was so empathetic. So there, there he, he exudes like love and connection and, and, and he's his, it's his love language is cultural sensitivity almost. And and for all that he's with the churches and leaders throughout Africa.
And that combined with just a really strong sense of discernment, led me to really feel like he is the right person for that role.
[00:14:31] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, totally echo that. And Sean, like, with you having so much experience working cross culturally just as a segue into kind of, you know, sharing a little bit more about how this all works in the Love justice model, I would love to ask you, like, what you think the most common mistakes foreigners make when partnering and working with local nationals.
[00:15:00] Speaker B: Yeah, well, so grateful, John, thanks for your kindness towards me. And I absolutely loved connecting with and meeting with John and the team that came to Zimbabwe and just learning about the mission of Love justice, you know, an organization that really wants to fight injustice from a Christ centered approach, Gospel centered approach. And that's what I've really loved. And so coming to your question about one of the biggest mistakes from what I've seen, and perhaps some of my experience is I think assuming the biggest mistake is assuming that our biggest challenge is, is strategy and funding.
And I don't think that is the biggest challenge. I think in reality, the biggest challenge is almost always ensuring that the right people are in leadership roles, the right people are serving. And so if the leadership isn't right, I think even the best programs and projects and designs won't survive long term.
And I know we've seen that at Love justice through many of the lessons that we've learned over the years. And still, the one thing I love about us at Love justice is that we love learning from our mistakes. One of our values failing fast enough and, you know, admitting our weaknesses, seeing, okay, that was a mistake we made. Let's shift and change. And so I think, yeah, I would say the greatest mistake, the biggest mistake that we can make as Westerners or foreigners in a context is thinking that strategy or building something amazing and funding is the, you know, the biggest challenge in the countries we want to work in, where it's actually people, the right people. Right?
[00:16:43] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
John, I think really quick it would be helpful for listeners who maybe are not familiar with the nuts and bolts of our model, just really quickly to explain the difference between a partner organization and a champion. And then your kind of national office staff and specifically, like, what is a champion and why did you decide to go with that model in terms of governance?
[00:17:09] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, as an organization, we need.
So we work through independent partner organizations that have their own board and governance. And that has been key for us because, like, that we can't Manage somebody across cultures. Even when I was there in Nepal, I found when I was managing people, it was just, like, fraught with pitfalls and misunderstandings on my part. And one of the things I've learned. I mean, Sean just said it, but, like, if you have the wrong. The wrong people, it doesn't matter how good your strategy is. It's not gonna. Nothing is gonna work. And if you have the right people, it also kind of. You almost don't even need the strategy. It's the very thing they're ready to do or, you know, and so you just give a little nudge and then they go. And so. But there needs to be a lot of, like, local ownership for complex, for to navigate the complexity required to do the things that we want to do. And so by champion is the first person that we would select in a country, and that would be a volunteer. And that's key because a staff relationship, you're talking about accountability, you're talking about management.
And you can't hold somebody accountable across cultures and across the ocean, or at least we haven't been able to do that. But the right. You know, but by choosing that volunteer that sets up their own governance, which governance is kind of universally accepted as necessary for nonprofits, you know, non profits need boards in order for them to not become corrupt and ineffective. And so, yeah, the champion would be a volunteer who would eventually usually become the chairman of the board.
And typically that would be with Love justice, you know, in blank country name. Sometimes that could be also working with an existing organization as well. So. So the. Our champions are. Are because they're volunteers, you know, like, we trust them, you know, and.
[00:18:59] Speaker B: And.
[00:18:59] Speaker C: And then they make the decisions about people. I. I've just. I have learned definitively that I, It's. I. I really. It's hard to not trust my judgment across cultures. But by choosing champions who have really outstanding reputations and then working with them over a long period to.
As we're exploring the possibility of piloting somewhere, which is what Sean does, we get a sense of that. We sort of ask them to show us their faithfulness and their effectiveness. And they often do. And so our champions, they're what makes the magic happen. That is the impact of Love Justice.
[00:19:35] Speaker A: Yeah. And Sean has the lofty task of recruiting them and sifting out, like, who is the right person and who's not. And, Sean, you inherited champions when you came on staff with Love justice. And some that are still with us, some that have transitioned out, and you are also actively recruiting champions for all of the new pilots that were starting now that we plan to start. And I think it would just be really cool for you to share like what are you looking for beneath resumes? Credentials, Charisma, the foreigner. Sweet talker.
When selecting a champion. And what signals tell you someone can navigate this paradox that we're talking about, this gap, rather than be crushed by it.
[00:20:20] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And I must say that this process of finding the right champion, it's not an overnight process. You know, we don't just look at resumes and, and see, oh, this guy's got the right credentials or this, you know, this amazing woman has, is an incredible leader. In our country. We don't just see resumes and, and those kinds of things. We're really looking for the right heart. And so this requires quite a lot of prayerful insight and a journey that we go on together. I think some champions have taken about two years to, to really onboard, build relationship with and work out. Is this the right person, partner to go with in this country? And it takes a team. It's not just, I must say that it's not just me looking for them. And I'll involve regional stewards and Bryony, our director of anti trafficking and, and we ask local missionaries and other churches in their countries. And so there's a variety of different people that are involved in this process as well. And the process itself is a long process where we ask some exploration questions. What's their personal vision and mission for this partnership? What are they hoping to get out of it? What is their understanding of the nature of human trafficking in their country? Is there a good local board that could govern this project and who are those people? So who do they know? Who do they trust? What's their relationship with the authorities? So we really are looking for people who have had some experience cross culturally that understand where we're coming from as particularly a Western entity, an NGO, and that they've had some experience in interacting with NGOs that they have track record, good history. In terms of fruit, is there fruit in their lives? Have they been entrusted with resources? So we're looking at those and you can't necessarily see those on a resume, but it takes time and a series of meetings together as we share our vision and our values and then asking them questions, what do you think this means and what does this look like? And really it's a lot about us learning from them and about them and their context that really helps us to really explore is this the right fit? So when I look at Jesus model You know, he. He prayed and he sought out people that you would think, no way Jesus chose those 12 people.
They don't seem right on paper.
But actually, when you dig deeper, the kind of journey that Jesus went on with these guys and how he picked them and chose them, it was almost always about the right heart. And were they humble, were they willing to learn?
Were they arrogant? Were they, you know, so there were some other qualities that could only come out over time that we can look and see. And that's kind of the process we go through as we look for the right partners, you know, right. Champions in their context. Are they trusted? Can we trust them? How well respected are they? What's their connection locally? Also language, you know, do they understand what we mean by what we say and are we understanding what they're saying? Because quite a lot gets lost in context and translation. Right.
And so we work and go on that journey together over some time. And part of the process, I'll give them a few tasks to do and things that we work on together and how they respond to some of the questions. And I ask them to show me what I've shown them or explain back to me what I've tried to help them understand.
And part of that process, as well as building a pilot plan and budget, putting together a budget, that's an interesting test, is when we ask a potential partner after some time, okay, let's work on a budget together. What do you think that's going to look like in your context? After having shared our vision and values, and if they come up with some crazy figure, then we know we've got a bit of work to do here. Right.
Because often in our kind of work in the humanitarian space, it's often about finding the next lot of funding to advance your cause or your mission. And. And we're not really looking for partners who are just looking for funding to advance their causal mission and willing to tag on a Love justice project to achieve that.
I didn't mean to sound so simplistic about it, but sometimes that's what we've got to look out for and watch out for. And it's subtle, you know, it comes in subtly over time. Yeah.
[00:25:03] Speaker A: Wow. Yeah. John, I just. I have so admired and appreciated watching you build this out over the last six, seven, eight years with Love justice and just have a lot of confidence in everything that you just said of like, you know, it's not a. You're making a decision on the spot. We're not making a decision out of urgency or like, reactivity you can guarantee that when we start a pilot, Sean's probably been talking to that partner or that champion for a minimum of two years, just so. And you kind of always have a group of people that you're talking to and any given time.
[00:25:42] Speaker C: Sean, how many champions do we do we have currently identified for countries that we're not working in. And how many people are you potential champions are you in discussion with?
[00:25:51] Speaker B: Well, yeah, that's quite a hard number to work out.
So on paper probably got about five current ones that could be ready to go.
But then there are about 15 different relationships that is on a slow burn and working out the relationship and dynamics within that country. And sometimes the country is not ready to partner and we've got two particular countries that actually it's not advisable to travel there. But the partners are really ready and good and they've submitted some proposals, but it's just not right at the time for us to partner with them. So yeah, there's so many.
The one thing I was going to say is sorry to shift gears there is. The one thing I really do look for in a good champion is their ability to say no. So it's easy to say yes to everything that an NGO with some funding is asking for to achieve that partnership. But if there's a champion who's able to say no, that's not over eager or seemingly desperate for the partnership, that can be a warning sign sometimes if they're not able to say no. So that's one of the things we look for, people who really care about the mission, care about their people, their context, their community and were willing to fight for them right to that. We call that the brokenhearted kind of anointing or a real brokenheartedness. And that's kind of some of the people we're looking for. Sorry to shift gears there something I forgot to mention.
[00:27:22] Speaker A: No, that's good, that's good.
And yeah John, I want to even call back to something that you had shared earlier and you kind of referenced like cross cultural decision making is long, it's frustrating dialogue, knowing when to compromise and when to hold fast. And I'm just curious like in practice, how does love justice decide which convictions are non negotiable and which methods must remain contextual and local. And you know, we have kind of the, the tools right like that are kind of the non negotiables. But how like kind of talk about like how we've come in that and how we're still real time filtering what's. What are we going to hold fast to what are we going to remain flexible with?
[00:28:09] Speaker C: Yeah, well, I mean, the short answer is like several multi year conversations with believers from many cultures about what is right. You know, and we do a lot. When we, when we created the transit monitoring standard, we told our monitors, we just said, go intercept potential victims of trafficking. And then we went and learned from what they're doing. And that is how we learned to do transit monitoring. We documented it. We documented it. And there's a lot of different channels by which we're constantly trying to get feedback from our teams on the ground and understand what is working for them, what is not working, what is it like to work for Love Justice? How can we serve you better?
And also what ideas do you guys have that we might share with others about? And you know, like Bryony, our senior director of anti trafficking, she has this vision of just facilitating sort of ground level ideation that we, that sort of broadcast. We learn, we document and we broadcast it out. And just so it's happening all the time.
Ways that we're collecting feedback through surveys, through focus groups, through trips and visitations, you know, through meetings between staff and even field to field, we're trying to facilitate communication and partnership and just cutting us out of it completely.
And even my marriage is one multi year conversation about what is right given the differences in cultures. And we're just trying to understand what does the Bible say, how does God want us to handle a given situation?
And what do we each need to reject and accept from our own cultural inheritance? And what do we want to learn from other cultures? But most importantly, what is the culture of the kingdom of God supposed to look like? And what we want to do is we want to find and build that culture. And we have to learn to reject a lot of things that we each learn from our own culture.
[00:29:58] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Be willing to both like acknowledge the good and the bad, which I think segues really well into this next question. And I'll start by having Sean answer it and then John, you can piggyback off it because I'd love to hear from both of you on this because I think in the nonprofit, specifically the global nonprofit space, Space, it's a very trendy topic to talk about empowering national staff. And you know, Sean, we, you and I have had a lot of discussions on how that can be both patronizing but also encouraging.
And I'm just curious, like, what has it looked like for Love justice to genuinely empower national staff over time, not just by giving responsibility, but this Transfer of wisdom, not just from the, the foreigners, the Westerners, but this transfer of wisdom back and forth, also judgment back and forth and ownership so that the work can outlast any leader, any expat, any season.
[00:31:02] Speaker B: Yeah, so such a great question. And you know, I, I think real empowerment is right down to leadership and ownership, being genuinely local.
And so when locals truly own the mission for themselves and love it and are serving that mission, not just because we're requiring compliance of them and we're telling them this is what you need to do to keep funding coming, but they're actually genuinely owning it. And we see that national local leaders are not just implementing someone else's program or project or idea, they're leading it and owning it in their own context and honing it and developing local relationships themselves and eager to advance that mission, eager to see others impacted by it. And when I hear champions coming back to me and to us, recommending we could start this work in another nation, we've got this potential partner and I just love those kind of connections with our local champions and project managers. What I love to see is cross pollination, as it were, between our, some of the project managers working, you know, in different countries. We recently took our Senegalese project manager to a pilot to help us with translation and interpretation for a pilot in Benin. And just seeing the ownership of the training, the tools that we've given by actually owning them herself and actually training them as if she was the creator of these projects and this training materials was such a joy to see and to see the fruit of that happen. So I think that for me is a real empowerment and local ownership.
[00:32:50] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And it just to affirm that as someone who has been in our training and compliance space for a long time, there is something that clicks when there's the peer to peer teaching and the peer to peer learning in a way that, you know, when our LJI training team goes in, not to discredit them like they, they lay the foundation, but there, there's like the, the, the last 10% that's like the most impactful that comes from the, the peer to peer relationships that we've really only unlocked, I would say in the last three, three years.
[00:33:26] Speaker B: Yeah. And when we provide that facilitation role of countries working together and not taking our hands with the steering wheel, but just a facilitation role, we've seen such incredible progress and greater impact in that when countries are working together, learning from each other from their own context, and they're doing so well with that.
[00:33:51] Speaker A: Yeah. John, anything else to add to that?
[00:33:55] Speaker C: Well, I mean, I.
Living in Nepal and overseeing things from the ground level is how I started out, you know, and for me, the way I learned to do this is like making a thousand mistakes over 20 years because I thought my culture was right.
And. But seeing the results of my mistakes and the harm and then learning to trust the Nationals and get out of the way so they can do what they're way better than me at doing. But. And then we restructured around that with our core competency. We set ourselves up and set up our way of working so that there's really no, no need for or question of transferring responsibility or ownership because we find the right Nationals and we give it to them fully from the beginning.
And when we restructured around that, instead of trying to call the shots from across culture and across oceans, we went from spinning our wheels and everything. I remember trying to expand into new countries. Thailand, we had two failed pilots in Bangladesh.
And it was so hard. You go there, you visit, you have these conversations with the Nationals about how and what to do. It's so hard to get things moving. And today we have four pilots happening right now. I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, guys, but I think pilots in Zimbabwe, Benin, Senegal and drc, I believe all of them that have started are already having impact. And we basically already know that they're going to work or that 60% of them, of them will.
And that's because when we restructured around our core competency, we figured out how to scale. And I want to say something about the peer to peer. We had two failed pilots in Bangladesh before our third pilot.
We brought a project manager, a Bangla speaking project manager from one of our stations in Nepal. And he was. And that was the breakthrough. That was what got, you know, helped them to get it, you know, so. And I do want to say, like, the impact that we have, it's theirs. They're the ones that are having the impact. They're the ones figuring out how to do it. You know, we're not. We're like these middlemen who we just do our core competency and we raise money and we ask people for impact in exchange for that, you know, and for some compliance and impact in exchange for us to give them the tools and the money needed to make an impact that they're, you know, in many cases, as eager, more eager than we are to have.
So.
[00:36:16] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's. So that's so good, Sean and John, as we, like, land this conversation, I just Want to ask maybe one final question. And Sean, we'll start with you, and John will end with you, is, you know, knowing our listeners come from a variety of different backgrounds and levels of engagement with Love justice. What's one thing you hope that they take away from this conversation?
[00:36:43] Speaker B: Yeah, such a great question. And, and I really think as, as we are like facilitators, capacity builders, encourage us, inspirers, and really entrusting locals with their own vision for their communities. You know, sustainable justice doesn't come from importing solutions. I think it really comes from faithful leaders serving their own communities.
And all they need is some inspiration, encouragement, capacity building, and someone to cheer them on in that. And I think as Love Justice, I think that's what we're doing really well. We're kind of cheering them on and providing them with excellent tools. And I think sustainable justice comes from that. Yeah, thanks, Sean.
[00:37:31] Speaker C: You know, I would, I would. What I would want listeners to take away is, you know, cultural inheritance. Just that idea. We inherit things in our culture and it's one of the most important things about us. It will define much of who we are. You know, and someone grew up, you can just think of any very poor country, you know, like the people that grow up there, they have a cultural inheritance that comes with that, and that will define much of their life, just as yours will define yours.
But it is not a matter of credit or blame.
We did not do anything to deserve the culture that we inherited.
But it will be a matter of credit or blame what we do with what we inherited.
And so I would say to our listeners, your life will ultimately be defined by what from your cultural inheritance you decide to keep and pass on and what you reject and cut off. And I would, I would encourage anyone listening today, build your culture around the scriptures and the moral law that God has written on your heart.
[00:38:33] Speaker B: Amen.
[00:38:35] Speaker A: Yeah, like, bomb goes up. Okay, thanks. Thanks, John. That's good.
One thing that I just want to remind our listeners about is that our work wouldn't be possible without our amazing and incredible donors. And Sean, you mentioned earlier, you've got five people that you think are ready for a pilot. You're talking to 15 more. That's double what we currently have. I think right now we've got.
I think we're working in 20 countries, maybe 19, 20 with the new pilots. And you said, you know, I'm talking to another 20. And when we talk about, like, okay, we're on, we're in a good momentum and we're anticipating that it'll Take us just three years to get the next hundred thousand. That's what we're inviting people into. We're inviting people into be a part of the next hundred thousand, be a part of the next wave of countries that we're hoping to expand to. But we can't do it without our donors and without new people coming into the Love justice family. So one way that people can partner with us is by joining Intercept Partners. Intercept Partners is our community of monthly donors who are invested in creating life changing impact which is made possible through the long term investment and shared responsibility with local leaders who bring that transit monitoring model to life in their countries. You know with John, you talked about how it's their impact, like they're the ones that own the impact. And I, I think we also get to be in partnership with them of like, you know, we get to own the impact by funding the impact. $112 is an intercept right now for us. So if anyone is feeling stirred by today's conversation or just, you know, the movement of like, oh, I think I'm feeling compelled to take that next step. I would just encourage people to visit lovejustice NGO Intercept Partners to learn more about how you can be a part of this momentum and of the story that God is writing in the lives of the least of these through our transit monitoring model. Um, John, thank you so much for your wisdom. You know, I think with leaders now and, and CEOs and founders, the gift that you can, the best gift that you can give is wisdom and knowledge in your time. Um, so just really thankful for the ways that you have given that to us today. And Sean, I always love the opportunity to connect with you and talk with you and you're just so contagious. You're so charismatic and, and your communications and ultimately just really thankful for your faithfulness over the years and, and your ability to like stick it out, your ability to work this out to a place where we're really gaining momentum and just, yeah, always, always thankful for you and the incredible work that you do on the front end of our, of our program work.
[00:41:19] Speaker B: Thanks Hannah. Such a joy.
Thanks Phil.
[00:41:22] Speaker C: Thank you Hannah. God bless you both. Appreciate your time.
[00:41:25] Speaker B: Yeah, bless you.
[00:41:27] Speaker C: We are grateful for the generous support, support of the Love justice community. Please consider joining our family of donors. Learn more at lovejustice ngo.
