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. I'm your host, Hannah Munn. Today's conversation gets at something that sits at the heart of justice work, but doesn't always get talked about honestly. And that is good intentions are not enough. If we truly want to love people, well, we have to be willing to ask the hard questions about whether our work is actually helping and just as importantly, whether it could be causing harm.
I'm joined today by John Molineau, founder and CEO of Love Justice International, and Scott Sabin, CEO of Plant With Purpose, a nonprofit that helps rural communities overcome poverty by restoring the environment, strengthening local economies, and empowering people to lead sustainable change.
We are going to be talking about the tension between compassion and effectiveness, why good intentions matter, but why they must be paired with accountability, measurement, and a willingness to face uncomfortable truths if we actually want to see lasting impact.
Guys, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for being here.
[00:01:14] Speaker B: Thank you,
[00:01:17] Speaker A: John. You're like a resident, permanent guest at this point on the Love justice podcast. So I'm going to take a minute just for Scott to introduce himself. Scott, who are you?
How do you find yourself here, and what have you been up to these days?
[00:01:31] Speaker B: Yeah, well, first, just a point of clarification. I'm the former CEO at Planet with Purpose.
I spent about 30 years as executive director and then CEO at Planet with Purpose.
Got there through a circuitous path, but really, God took me by the hand. I'd spent seven years as a naval officer, and while I was in grad school, God opened my eyes to issues of injustice, justice, and extreme poverty. And probably most impactful for me, to people living their faith in a sacrificial way, serving their neighbors, putting their lives on the line for issues of justice. And that inspired me so much that as I was finishing my last semester in graduate school, I started volunteering at Plan with purpose, and 33 years later, have moved into a halftime role where I'm hoping to use the other half of my time to share some of what I've learned and to be a resource for the Christian nonprofit and NGO community.
[00:02:48] Speaker A: Oh, that's. Yeah, that's amazing, Scott. And I feel like a lot of the leaders that we've been having recently on the podcast have a similar heart of. I've got a lot to share, and I. The most generous thing that I can do right now is give of my time and give of my wisdom. Um, so we're just really thankful that you're wanting to do that. With us today. We were chatting really briefly before we hit record. You guys met at a retreat and just realized that you're very like minded in, in the ways that you think about development work. Um, and what I want to talk about first is that most people who step into development or charity work start from a really good place.
They see hurting, they see suffering, they see injustice, and they want to help. Compassion and good intentions are an important starting point. We've kind of talked about that and massaged that out in a couple of other episodes. But over time, many leaders discover that intentions alone aren't enough. So, Scott, I'd love to hear from you. And in your experience, why is compassion such an important place to begin? And what are some of the moments that helped you realize that good intentions also need to be paired with deeper understanding and accountability?
[00:04:01] Speaker B: Yeah.
When I began, we were working with about 80 families in the Dominican Republic. And one of the most life giving things for me was to visit and talk with them and hear just how much they felt they'd gained from working with plant with purpose, how much their lives had been transformed.
And that gave me the energy I needed to come back and work.
But I started to notice after about two or three years that every time we visited, we were visiting the same five families, we were talking to the same people. And I began to ask, well, what about everybody else? You know, we'd expanded to that point to where we're serving about 250 families. Well, what's going on with them?
And about the same period of time, we had a problem where one of the crops we were promoting, oregano, suffered a market crash.
And suddenly we had hundreds of farmers that we'd told to plant oregano, who, in the words of one farmer that I will never forget, told me, we can't sell oregano and my kids can't eat it.
What are you going to do?
And that led to a kind of a more comprehensive analysis. And we came away with the discouraging, somewhat shocking conclusion that we weren't really benefiting most of the people we visited. Five families because those were the ones who were really benefiting and that there were some that were actually becoming indebted and really we had ended up inadvertently hurting.
[00:05:50] Speaker A: Wow. And I'm just curious, how did that make you feel when you started to realize that, as were you, the CEO at that point?
[00:05:59] Speaker B: It was about the time that I became the CEO. I can't remember, to be honest.
I was acting for sure, interim CEO and oh no, it just was a standing.
We were Talking earlier a little bit about working through local partners. And so I spent an afternoon standing in front of about 300 farmers as they unleashed on us.
The fact that we worked through a local partner meant that the local partner was taking the brunt of the frustration and anger. And that was one of those times that I felt grateful that our local partner was kind of the. The interface. But, no, that was. That was a real low point and probably a point where I can't remember, but I probably considered moving on.
I've also always had a sense that, you know, I can't leave until I've fixed it. So.
[00:06:59] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:07:00] Speaker B: 33 years later.
[00:07:02] Speaker A: Yeah, I appreciate your candor in that response. And just, like, what I hear you say is just this uncomfortable, like, uncomfortable confrontation of like, oh, my gosh.
And then on top of that, Scott, you shared in one of your. Your pieces of writing that you had a time where a donor asked you a pretty confronting question, and that was, are we doing good work?
Maybe. Can maybe around the same time as this experience? I don't know. And I'm curious, like, how did that lead you to realize that activity and impact are not the same thing? And where did you go from these two confronting realities?
[00:07:44] Speaker B: You know, it took a long time for that to sink in. I would answer his question every time he'd ask the question, you know, are we doing good work? I'd answer with, you know, we've made X number of loans, we've planted X number of trees. And, you know, he'd always clarify, that's not what I'm asking.
And I think when we realized that we were not benefiting people, we had to go back and rethink. All right, what is the outcome we're looking for? What are we trying to achieve here? It's not planting trees, it's not making loans.
We defined ourself by the fact that we promoted agroforestry.
Is that in itself the outcome we're looking for? And so we had to go back and completely rethink what's our end goal here.
And so that question was just one of the data points that kind of began to inform that transition from we're going to define ourselves about what we do as opposed to defining ourselves by what it is we're trying to achieve.
[00:08:59] Speaker A: Yeah. And, Scott, I. I imagine, and just even hearing John share similar sentiments, which I'll give John a second here to kind of chime in and, and also respond to that, this question, but that that confrontation and sticking with it takes a level of Humility and, like, admitting your weaknesses to be like, okay, we're. We're not doing what. What we're set out to do, or maybe we're not doing what we intended to do. And that can.
That can invoke a lot of, like, feelings of taking. You can either continue bulldozing on and ignore those data points that you were talking about, or having the softness and the humility and the awareness to be like, no, I think we need to pivot. And that could be painful. It might be hard. It might be, you know, X, Y, Z. But. But it's what you felt was the right thing to do as the leader of the organization. And that's a really hard decision to make and one that I. I think, yeah, not a lot of people probably understand the weight of that.
So, John, I'd love for you to just share.
When you've had moments in your work with Love justice, where you realize that you were measuring activity and not impact and kind, humble, maybe breaking down moments of, we gotta pivot.
[00:10:23] Speaker C: Yeah.
Well, first of all, Scott, well done for. For facing up to that. And that's hard. And like, I. I've been in those moments, and there's a lot of instincts inside of me that want to be defensive, that want it. That don't want to face it, that don't want to admit, you know, and so. But if. If you think back that moment, you know, the choice that you had and the decision that you made, all the impact that you guys have had happened because of that, you know, like, all the positive impact that you guys had happened because you faced that. So well done. Yeah, so. So for me, there was a.
Early, Very early on when I was living in Nepal, there we were. We were working with another organization that worked with street kids, and they had had, I don't, a decade or something of, like, multiple missionaries in the field were on the streets working with these kids, and they'd only ever got one kid off the street in all that time.
And that. That.
That child fooled them.
And I was. And I was sort of, you know, working with it alongside them and with them. And he said, the best thing you could do for those boys is get out of their lives.
And that definitely hit that organization. It hit me, like, pretty hard and had to really, like, face up to that. And so, I mean, we all begin with compassion, and you need compassion, but I feel like you need more than compassion. You need, like, a broken heart to push, you know, through the hard things that will come.
And you really need to have a Sharp mind.
Because world's greatest injustices are complicated. There's this huge cultural gap. Problems don't get and stay as bad as the world's greatest injustices are by any other way except being hard to fix. So in terms of measuring activity and not impact.
So first of all, in our homes we measured a lot of things over the years. None of it was really the impact that we were aiming for. We'd measure things like IQ and we would measure the nutrition of our kids to BMI and their emotional well being. And then we had this.
But we had this. We realized like the, the core objective of our homes is to provide loving and nourishing nurturing homes that equip orphan and abandoned children to live, lead Christ connected, flourishing, impactful lives. And there's a lot in that and it's not even something you almost can measure, you know, until, until you see the legacy of their whole life. But we developed, we developed a flourishing life assessment to try to measure that. We're now using a, a flourishing, a human flourishing tool that was developed by Harvard and another school.
But in our anti trafficking work we started measuring intercepts very early and we used to, originally we would just report on convictions kind of as stories.
And eventually we realized that arrests were a better metric. They're more timely, they're more responsive to our actions and they actually depend on our actions.
But even intercepts and arrests are in some sense kind of an activity.
The real thing, the real core objective of our anti trafficking work is to reduce the prevalence of slavery. And that had long been the stated goal of our work, to reduce it only recently we have data that can measure that. And the Walk Free foundation is the only organization that measures prevalence of slavery. And each of the 16 countries that we started working in prior to 2022 saw the prevalence of slavery decline over the course of our work.
[00:14:02] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah.
Scott, were you going to say something?
[00:14:06] Speaker B: Yeah, no, just.
[00:14:08] Speaker C: Oh, sorry, I'm going to have to go back.
[00:14:10] Speaker A: No, Scott like held his breath, so I wanted to give him a moment to chime in there.
[00:14:15] Speaker B: No, as John, as you were listing some of the qualities, I think the other thing that comes across that I think is necessary is humility. And I think if I can say this, as Americans, that can be one of the things that we lack. We think that because we've been successful elsewhere, we can be successful in somebody else's culture, somebody else's society. And so we come over with our solutions and oftentimes they're solutions in search of a problem.
[00:14:48] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah, no, I agree, Scott. I would just say, like, so much humility is needed to realize how little we know, to realize how far the cultural gap is from a spiritual perspective. It's been super important for me to realize I'm not a savior or a hero. And in fact, I'm just like a middleman that's blessed to be a part of what people are doing. And the heroes are our donors and our staff on the front lines. And I think if I hadn't had that, I don't know, God kind of broke me in some ways to get me to the point where I really feel that in my heart.
And I think if it hadn't happened like a tyrant, I'm sure I would have destroyed the organization long ago.
[00:15:33] Speaker B: Yeah, you mentioned we're not saviors. And I think one of the things that's easy to forget is that we have a savior. Right. And it's not us.
Um, Bryant Myers, I think in, in Walking with the Poor talks about how we like to play God in the lives of the poor and, and that that maybe satisfies our, our desire to be like God, which is. Has always been the temptation.
[00:16:02] Speaker C: Right?
Yeah, Yeah.
[00:16:05] Speaker A: I think what's, what is important context, too, for, for listeners. Cause I'm kind of hearing you guys play back and forth off each other. And we mentioned it before the call and before we clicked record. Is that something that Plant with Purpose and lovejustice have in common? I think. Scott, chime in here. If I'm, if I'm misrepresenting you guys in any way, is that we work through local partners. And so there are not American staff on the ground in every country that we work in and serve in, but rather we're finding the local nationals who are the right people, who've got the knowledge, who know the culture, who are maybe experienced working cross culturally with funding organizations, but we're partnering with them to make the work possible. And essentially, you know, they navigate the relational, the relational aspects, they navigate the cultural. They take the tools that we're giving them and. But they maximize it in a way that really complements with their culture and not us telling them how to do it to a T. And so, yeah, I think that's probably some helpful context to have here too. Just thinking about international development work, and there's different ways that you see people do that. And we probably are a little bit more unique in that we're not just the absentee donor, just giving money, don't maybe visit once a year. We're a little we're like a little bit of a hybrid between that and then people who are, you know, expats, American expats, living in the country, running the offices shoulder to shoulder. We're this unique space in the middle that, you know, John, you would argue has been the key to the success of the work that we're able to do.
[00:17:42] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:17:42] Speaker A: And Scott, I wonder if you would also probably agree with that.
[00:17:46] Speaker B: Oh, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:17:49] Speaker C: The right, the right nationals are. I learned better than me at everything and I make a mess with trying to work across the culture. And so just find the right national, that has to be the right nationals. And that's hard. We've made, we've made a lot of mistakes and really had to learn to get, get better at that.
But once you find them, everything is easy. Without them, it's even all the best processes and programs in the world will fail. And with them you almost don't even need.
You barely need the processes and the programs.
[00:18:24] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. It's funny, we do a lot of teaching sustainable agriculture and people used to ask me all the time. I think the impression was that I was going to teach agriculture in Haiti or Dominican Republic. And what I like to tell people, and it's true, is that I spent one summer working on a farm in college.
It was the first job I ever got fired from. And the idea of me teaching anybody anything about agriculture was ludicrous anyway.
[00:18:58] Speaker A: Well, something that I think is really important to talk about in the landscape of nonprofit work is that, you know, we're a non for profit, so funders and donors are looking to steward their finances with nonprofits. And one of the ways that is a really compelling hook for donors is stories.
And who has the most compelling story, who has the most tear jerking story to grip people to actually give, like, feed into action.
And Scott, something that you talk about is why stories are powerful but also sometimes can be misleading when it comes to understanding whether a program is actually working. I'd love for you to talk a little bit more about that and maybe specifically from the lens of, you know, maybe one of our. I would almost be willing to bet that a lot of our listeners are, you know, looking to invest their finances in something that's really impactful. So even as a, you know, speaking to a donor, like, here's what can be really good, but here's also what I would recommend, you know, to think about as you're hearing. Stories.
[00:20:03] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And so stories are compelling. And that was, you know, as I shared earlier, the first three Years I was getting stories, I was going right to the farms and hearing great stories. So it was pretty easy. I think it's, you know, the more people you work with, the more iterations you've got to find the one or two people who are really going to tell you what you want to hear. And, and, and so I really advocate for a combination. Stories are still the most compelling thing, but the data and the impact evaluations let you, let you know that those are not one offs. You're not cherry picking, but they're representative of something else that's happening.
And so I think that that's, you mentioned, you know, what should a donor look for more and more, you know, even big evaluators like Charity Navigator are cataloging whether or not you're measuring your impact.
Now there's no real standard way for doing that and that's still a big challenge.
But, but is an organization asking those questions and are they reporting on something other than just the activities?
And we found initially for the, maybe the rank and file donor story is still what they're looking for.
And in fact, I think if we have a weakness or it's that we flood people with data that causes them to glaze over, tell stories, still tell stories. But for larger donors, the fact that we can demonstrate impact has been transformational for us.
We grew significantly once some of the bigger foundations discovered that we were measuring impact and we've done it effectively. So the two really work hand in hand.
[00:22:15] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
This segues really well into my next question, which is for John mainly because, you know, you've really learned over the years that we need to be honest, like have our honest assessments like where, where are we weak, where are we underperforming, where are we? And not to undermine, you know, the areas that we're doing really well. But you've really adopted this like really aggressive culture of where, where, what's our honest assessment of where we're at? And I'll let, I'll let you talk a little bit more about that, but what I wanted to ask was why do you think it's so important for leaders in this space to be willing to look honestly at results?
Because sure, you've got the funding that's on the line, but even more so you've got your bottom line, which is the least of these, the poor, the vulnerable.
And yeah, so I'd love for you to talk a little bit about that. I'd love you to press into a little bit more about how you have the natural instinct, your bias like you want this to be working, um, and just how that all comes to play and how maybe you combat it. Yeah, I'm asking a really loaded question now, I'm not being very good at asking a concise question, but I think you get the point and would just, yeah, love for you to share your heart in, in that, John.
[00:23:35] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, so I mean, the mandate of charity is impact.
You know, recently I wrote an article called Charity without impact is Dead. It kind of, and it's kind of obvious, like the love that is the essence of charity cares about impact.
One definition of charity is self giving love that seeks the good of another. The good, the good of the benefit, the impact, that's impact. And if you're not seeking that good, that's not charity. It contradicts the spirit and essence of what it is.
So also, if you don't have a preference of more good to less, that's not really charitable either. Because if it was you, you'd want more impact rather than less. You know, if it was your loved ones, you would want more impact rather than less. We're supposed to do unto others as we would have others do unto us.
And then secondly, if you're not willing to honestly look at the results to check to see if the people who it's your mandate to help are being helped or harmed, that's almost like throwing things over a fence, not even bothering to see if they are helping or hitting people on the head or giving injections blindly to people, not even seeing around to see if it helped or hurt them. You know, you're not fulfilling your mandate because if again, if it was your loved ones getting the injections, you would want to make sure that the person was checking is this helping? You know, and so, and especially when the results are uncomfortable, that is when you may be harming the people who others are paying money to you to help.
That's when it, that's when you mo. It's most needed to be checking.
And I think the term you'd use if this took place in a developed field like medicine would be something like gross negligence.
You know, it's essential for leaders to honestly look at results, never more so when those results are uncomfortable. But I also will say it's hard because we have a bias. And especially when, never more than when you've stood up on a stage, talked about the work, told these happy stories, people are writing checks, and then all of a sudden you're facing up that maybe that's not maybe the impact that we said we were having is not real or maybe we're actually doing harm, the temptation. And I would just say it's really hard to be very honest in those situations. And so I kind of realized this slowly and I was probably the last in love, justice or among the last to sort of really realize it or face up to it. There's many fair minded people like Hannah. You've been a part of those conversations. Kirk and Mike, the chairperson of our board, John Hudlow, one of our staff for many years.
Yeah, I think that raising these issues and kind of making me see how really, really true it is to admit for us to admit our weaknesses and how strong our bias is.
And I remember at first feeling really terrified to do it, to start admitting our weaknesses, to start, you know, having open forums, what are our weaknesses? And inviting anybody to speak to it. And as I started to do it, I was like, okay, this really is a weakness. And then things that we would identify as a weakness two years later would become a strength because we, and we would, we started the practice of. Hannah, you mentioned honest assessments we do in every area of our, of our work. At our annual gatherings, we do honest assessments, we identify weaknesses and then we say here, what's the plan? And then we do it again next year and we do it again next year. And you can go back through those and you can just see this history of improvement from doing that. That if we hadn't been doing that, we would not be where we are today.
[00:27:14] Speaker A: Yeah. Scott, anything. I want to give you a chance, anything that you would add to that.
[00:27:19] Speaker B: A couple things. But I think, John, you really hit on it. One of the reasons for being honest is so you can get better. I mean, if we don't identify, it's like if you're going to do a sport, you want a coach to tell you where you can improve.
You don't want them to tell you, oh, you're great, you're great. Because at some point, at some point reality is going to come crashing down on you, you know, And I think that donors who think about it know that there's room for improvement. We don't want to admit there's room for improvement. We want to say, oh, you know, we're the, we, we are solving, we're eliminating slavery, we're solving poverty. We're.
And it only takes a little bit of looking around to say that. Organizations have been saying that for decades and poverty isn't solved and slavery hasn't ended. So where's the disconnect?
I had a foundation, I Remember years ago, say, you know, the quickest way to not get funding from us in the future is to tell us that everything's great.
If you're not honest with us, we're not going to trust what you say.
And, and I think that that's,
[00:28:30] Speaker C: I
[00:28:31] Speaker B: mean, that, that was eye opening to me, but it also made me realize that funders want to collaborate with us on this effort to continue getting better.
And, and yeah, if we're not, if we're not honest about where we are, we're never going to get better.
[00:28:52] Speaker A: Let me ask you guys this question. Why?
And maybe, maybe I could be unfairly positioning NGOs potentially. And it's a, it's a general, broad question, but why, why do you think nonprofits are maybe more susceptible to some of the lack of accountability, like medicine or like business or John, you know, like the malpractice, the negligence, the lack of compliance. Like, what is it about the nonprofit space?
Maybe that's a little bit late to that, that game, if you will.
And.
Yeah, like what?
Maybe. Actually I'll just, I'll stop with that question. Stop with that question. Then I can ask a follow up if, if I can get my words right for the second one I want to ask.
[00:29:43] Speaker C: So, so one reason is like, if you compare the way that incentive incentives work in international charities compared to Norma, in normal markets, the person who chooses, they pay and experience the outcome, that's the same person.
Whereas in charities those are three different people.
So in markets, bad decisions get corrected because the same person feels the cost. But markets, yeah, charities are prone to doing what looks effective to donors rather than what actually works for the beneficiaries. And the beneficiaries don't really have a way to get their voices into the decision.
So.
Yeah, that's what I'd say.
[00:30:19] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that this is where, I mean, John, you phrased that absolutely perfectly. But this is where there's extra responsibility on us as nonprofit executives because most of our donors, now, the more sophisticated donors can commission their own impact evaluations, can go visit, can see firsthand, but most of our donors are dependent on us to tell them how we're doing.
And so our integrity is on the line here. And it's pretty easy, especially if we don't know, especially if we've never done evaluations ourselves. It's pretty easy to tell donors who might maybe don't know any better that we are eliminating slavery, that we are eliminating poverty, that we're the best thing that's ever happened.
And people Say, hey, well, I know John, I know Scott, they're good people. I'm going to give him my money because he's eliminating poverty.
And so that's where our integrity is on the line because there isn't that market based feedback loop.
[00:31:33] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. And it's hard to know like if one, I mean, living in Nepal 20 years, there was a lot of things that were right under my nose that I didn't see and it was the last thing in the world I would have thought was, was happening or whatever, you know. And so it is.
[00:31:51] Speaker A: And you were there, you were living
[00:31:53] Speaker C: and I was there. And yeah, and it took a lot of learning before I became, I don't know, cynical. But, but, but just like for example, I, I've learned to expect corruption in every, every corner that we're not specifically positioned to know. You know, that there, you know, and there's a lot of things that you have to be very, very kind of nose in about. And, and, and it's hard to do that. In fact, I almost want to say it's almost impossible to do it across cultures.
I think it can be done. And, but it, it's, yeah, it's taken us a long, a lot of learning to figure out some ways to do that.
I'm sure we'll discover another big thing, you know, next meet and have another, and have a. But, but because what we know that we know we're gonna, we know there's stuff that's wrong and we need to improve and, and we want to, we actually are eager to, to find out what the next thing is so we can get better there, you know.
[00:32:53] Speaker A: Yeah. And I, I, this ties in really nicely with just our core value, John, of Do no Harm.
And like, I'd love for you to talk a little bit about what you mean by that.
That's gonna be the, the name of, of this podcast episode is do no Harm. And it's kind of under the precipice that once you become aware that your work might be causing harm, we, and there's probably like, yeah, I think you could also talk about, you know, the good intentions and how good intentions can actually be harmful to people and kind of dig into that a little bit more.
But why we carry the responsibility to address it once we're aware of it. And why do you see accountability and transparency not as criticism, but as an expression of love for the people that we serve and the donors who trust us?
[00:33:40] Speaker C: Yeah, well, I mean there's this quote by Rick Warren.
I think it's his introduction to the poverty of nations. And he says, having traveled around the globe to 134 countries, I'm convinced that almost every NGO and poverty program harms the poor rather than helps them. And it's a really strong statement from a pretty influential, thoughtful person. And I don't know. I don't. It's so strong. I don't know that I would quite go. Go as far as he does.
But it's. It definitely, like, it's really easy to do harm, and it's really easy. And I think the primary ways that I've experienced that is facilitating corruption, facilitating abuse, and learned disempowerment.
And so those are, those are the three that I've seen are very common. So, but so in terms of like, why do. Why is it so important? I mean, because love doesn't want to harm people. It wants to help people and take care to ensure that we're not harming people.
And just think of what trouble love goes to to help people to avoid harm like raising a child. What tender diligence over time does love require from us as parents? And, you know, if whatever we do, Jesus said whatever we do for the least of these, we do for him. If we love him and we love those people, you know, we want to think very intentionally how to ensure that people are helped and not harmed. I don't think we need the same 24, 7 for years that it is for parents, but it warrants just intentionality of care.
You know, if you care about the beneficiary, if you love them, as is your mandate, you need to be transparent and accountable and you need to make sure that you're helping them and not harming them.
[00:35:31] Speaker A: Yeah, I know you share the sentiment. I think that was the, if I'm not mistaken, that might have been the title of your article is do no Harm or something along those same lines. I'd be curious to hear just from you on that same question.
[00:35:44] Speaker B: Yeah, well, two things.
You know, when, when the question was ridiculously posed, I was thinking primarily in terms of the ways that we disempower, that we rob people of agency
[00:36:00] Speaker A: and
[00:36:01] Speaker B: don't facilitate the use of their talents or creativity.
And there's so many ways that that happens. Oftentimes it can happen by giveaways.
You know, a lot of those kind of stories are famous. The decline of the indigenous tailoring in numerous countries because of secondhand American clothing and cheap fashion getting dumped on them.
But, you know, we experienced it in the fact that our original program was very prescriptive you plant this on this, on this system and we will come along and do the. And it was a lot of money to incentivize it, but it was very prescriptive and very little room for creativity. And then we controlled the marketing of the produce, which again, I remember a farmer telling me, these trees aren't my trees, they're your trees.
Yeah, I'm growing them for you, but they're not mine.
So that was what I was originally thinking. But John, what you were just talking about with the idea, the corruption, that's a whole nother aspect.
You know, I think about all of the accounting standards that exist here in the US and people still find ways to embezzle. And I've, I've seen it happen in churches I've been involved in, et cetera. It happens all the time.
Now you throw in the cross cultural dimension, but you also throw in a dynamic that I think is, is, is really common and that is the rose colored glasses that say, oh, their hearts are so pure. These are pastors who just want to.
And what I realized we were doing is we're setting people up for failure by not having accountability and transparency in place.
And you know, as Jesus teaches us how to pray, lead me not into temptation.
And yet we're putting more money than people have ever seen in front of them with no accountability.
And we are directly oftentimes leading them into temptation, not setting them up for success. And the kindest thing we can do is to remove that temptation.
I wasn't thinking of going there, but you did mention the corruption.
It's, you know, my favorite. I think it's a Ronald Reagan quote, but is trust but verify and set it up in advance so that you don't have to come in after the horses left the barn and then figure out how much money got vanished.
[00:38:46] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We've definitely learned that that's admit your weaknesses and we've definitely learned a lot in that area over the years and hopefully continue to, you know, be sharper and sharper. But yeah, Scott, I appreciate your, your thoughts there.
John, you were. Sorry, I want to pause. John, I didn't know if you were going to chime in there or if I can, if I can ask my next question.
[00:39:12] Speaker C: Well, I mean, I just would say like this leading into temptation, that can happen.
You know, Western charity money being imported in scotch and quantity of people aren't used to it just, it has a corrupting influence on the church and almost can be devastatingly so.
And it's the amount of you need to have things in place that are tight and strict and clear and multiple layers or multiple levels. You need to create an environment where you will find out if it's happening and it will happen.
And you just need to make sure that everybody knows. And if you put those things in place and they're strong and they're clear and it's in early, it really matters and makes a difference.
[00:40:10] Speaker A: I think particularly, Scott, the line of in quantities that like whoever is receiving it hasn't, maybe hasn't ever experienced before is so profound and something that I think is so easily lost, specifically in, from people in more developed countries where maybe a hundred dollars is like, oh, yes, of course, like, yes, the hundred dollars where it's like that could be someone's salary for cover, their salary for three months, potentially. You know, it's just, we don't truly, I think unless you've lived in it, you've been in it for a long time, you don't, you don't really fully understand what you just said, especially in the beginning.
And that's so. Yeah, I think that's just a profound thought.
Scott, for listeners who are, who really care about development work, who care about helping the poor, but may feel overwhelmed by some of the complexities that we've talked about, what encouragement would you give them about how to pursue doing good thoughtfully and respond, pursue doing good both thoughtfully and responsibly in action and in giving.
[00:41:23] Speaker B: Wow.
Well, I think one of them is to see if an organization is measuring their impact.
I think that, you know, there's also ways of seeing who do they work with, who, you know, what partnerships or other organizations have they worked with.
You know, we're part of both Accord, which is the Christian NGO network, and has, Has helped us to up our game and, and, and, and make us more accountable as well as interaction, which is a, a secular similar network, but in a secular context. But so I think in, in other words, that they're not operating in a vacuum and they're measuring their impact would be the first two things that come to my mind.
And don't lose hope. I mean, it's really easy to, you know, one story of corruption, one story like the Three Cups of Tea story that was floating around 10 years ago or whatever, and people throw up their hands and say, oh, it's all going to waste and there's a lot of good work taking place. Takes a little bit of due diligence to figure out who you want to support.
But don't give up hope.
[00:43:00] Speaker C: Scott, I appreciate what you said, what you mentioned, the independent. I don't even know what they do with the independent organizations. Like, honestly, like, you wouldn't trust, we wouldn't trust a drug company to do its own clinical trials. And it just tells you how it works, you know. And so like, there is something that I think it's a change that needs to happen and we can't find this hardly or like we can't hardly find this out there. But we're trying to get independent, you know, like verification of our impact by, you know, independent people in all of our fields. Because we realize, like, yeah, if our people say it's real, you know, that means nothing, or at least it doesn't mean nothing. But because we're, we have processes in place that are really intentional and strong. But nonetheless, I think it needs to become the gold standard. I think for nonprofits to have independent valuations in their impact, they need to have impact and they need an independent verification of that impact. And one of the things that I'm a big advocate for, Scott, is I think that nonprofits should aim to put their impact in terms of X dollars can do X impact.
[00:44:07] Speaker B: But I'm certainly hearing that that metric more and more from donors as well, from institutional donors.
[00:44:15] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, about independent, like independent verification
[00:44:19] Speaker B: of impact, but well, also an impact per dollar.
[00:44:23] Speaker A: Yeah, okay. Yeah. Impact on the dollar.
[00:44:26] Speaker C: And one, one last thing I want to say to our listeners.
I'm an impact elitist. I know a lot of organizations and I, Scott, we sat together at the refuge and I asked you a lot of questions about the impact that you guys had. And I came away from that thinking, you guys have really great impact on the dollar. So well done. And I, and anybody who's listening, check out Plant with Purpose. They're a uniquely impactful organization.
[00:44:53] Speaker A: John, you're taking the words right out of my mouth because I was going to ask Scott where people can go to learn more about Plant with Purpose.
Scott, where can they go?
[00:45:02] Speaker B: Yeah, well, plantwithpurpose.org, and we do an in depth impact evaluation every three years.
This fall we're going to start data collection again.
Household surveys on, I think about 5,000 households.
At least that's what we did in 2023. So our 2024 published the analysis and that's available in depth on our website. Kind of interactive.
It's a lot more fun than our printed impact evaluation because you can see things. But that would be where I would start.
Follow us on social media as well. We've got on all channels so look forward to hearing from the listeners.
[00:45:53] Speaker A: Yeah, we really appreciate your time, Scott and John. Really appreciate.
Yeah, just your wisdom, always. It's not a surprise to me after the last 45 minutes, why you guys are kindred spirits.
Yeah. And so for those of us who are doing this work, other practitioners, we have to be willing to examine the work honestly, not just to celebrate good intentions. We owe that to the people we serve and to the donors that make our work possible. And if you're giving, if you're listening today and you're also a giver, here's the invitation.
Ask good and hard questions, look beyond the activity, and intentionally choose to support organizations that can show real, measurable impact. In fact, John, you have drafted an email asking a set of six questions. This is part of our Loving Justice Bible study that you literally give prospective donors the questions to ask. So if anyone's listening today that wants those questions, shoot me an email. Hannahovejustice will get you those questions. And just want to equip our listeners in this community to be thoughtful, generous investors.
Thanks, guys.
[00:47:03] Speaker B: Thank you.
[00:47:05] Speaker C: We are grateful for the generous support of the lovejustice community. Please consider joining our family of donors. Learn more at lovejustice ngo.
