President's Blog

There cannot be many among us who are sad to see the final days of 2008. It has been a difficult year in so many ways.

One indication of how hard it has been is that we are over spent in our emergency relief budget by an embarrassing amount at Episcopal Relief & Development. There seemed to be no end of civil strife, famine, flooding, and hurricanes. So much hurt and pain. Time to turn the page, no doubt about that!

Happily, as Christians, we are lifted by hope. My wife found this lovely poem by Emily Dickenson and so I offer the first verse to you, a small gift for the New Year!

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all.

May 2009 bring peace, joy and HOPE to a hurting world.

For a link to the full poem click here:
http://www.online-literature.com/dickinson/827/

This final verse from Christina Rossetti’s poem, “In the Bleak Midwinter” always causes me to catch my breath:

What can I give Him,
Poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd
I would bring a lamb,
If I were a wise man
I would do my part,
Yet what I can I give Him,
Give my heart.

As Christmas comes upon us later this week, give Jesus your heart. And as Jesus asks us, let us do unto the least of these what we would do unto Him.

Merry Christmas friends.

To see the full poem, click here.

Three years after delivering the first long-lasting insecticide-treated net to a remote community at the end of the road in rural Zambia, NetsforLife® has distributed its one millionth net.

My colleague, Shaun Walsh, Executive Director of NetsforLife® was in Kisumu Kenya to mark the occasion. There was much dancing and singing to mark this joyous occasion.

As most of you know, Episcopal Relief & Development is an implementing partner of NetsforLife®. However, reaching this milestone would not have been possible without our other partners: the ExxonMobil Foundation, Standard Chartered Bank, Coca-Cola Africa Foundation, Starr International Foundation, White Flowers Foundation and Christian Aid.

In addition, none of what has been accomplished could have come to pass without the hard work of all of our Anglican Church partners in the field whose experience, local knowledge and incredible efforts at mobilization have paved the way for NetsforLife®’s success.

Along with this momentous achievement, we have trained a veritable army of local volunteer malaria agents across 15 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. These dedicated individuals work on the front lines of net distribution and community education on net use, malaria prevention and symptom recognition. They are the eyes, ears, hearts and feet of NetsforLife® and we should all be profoundly grateful for their life-saving efforts.

Besides distributing nets and training people to work in communities with their friends, colleagues and neighbors on malaria prevention, NetsforLife® has achieved remarkable success in instilling a ‘net culture’ in communities that were previously unaware of the benefits of sleeping under a long-lasting insecticide-treated net.

In all of its countries of implementation, NetsforLife® has recorded astonishing increases in people’s awareness of malaria prevention, symptom recognition and environmental management to control malaria. Most dramatically, overall use of bed nets among those most vulnerable to malaria –children and pregnant women– has increased on average from 12% to 88% in the communities where NetsforLife® is present.

In addition, our third party evaluators report that in communities where NetsforLife® is present:

• 4 out of 5 households have at least one long-lasting insecticide treated net
• 9 out of 10 children under five years of age slept under a net the night before the random monitoring and evaluation took place
• 4 out of 5 pregnant women slept under a net the night before the random monitoring and evaluation took place

Based on this kind of impact, our third party evaluators estimate that between 2006 and 2008 the lives of approximately 12,000 children under five were saved as a result of NetsforLife®.

These statistics are certainly impressive. However, it was what one of the priests where we work said to Dr. Stephen Dzisi, the NetsforLife® Technical Director, which really hit it home for me:

“Before NetsforLife came to this area, community members used to wake me up in the middle of the night at least 4 times every month to baptize and anoint a sick child only to bury him/her the next day. However since the program started such midnight calls have ceased. I believe that NetsforLife is saving lives.”

Everyone in the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion can be deeply gratified by these results and give thanks for the work we have been able to do together. Nothing demonstrates to me more profoundly the power of partnership. Together we can eliminate malaria and heal a hurting world.

Gloria In Excelsis Deo!

It’s budget season at Episcopal Relief & Development. That’s never a fun time in an organization and that’s just as true with us as anywhere else, particularly this year. Try as I might to live into a theology of abundance and not scarcity, sometimes that’s hard.

However, a very proud grandfather and former board member sent this story to me, which really hit home for me how young people can be the best at showing us Christ at work in the world. I hope it inspires you as much as it inspired me.

His granddaughter’s family had picked up a Gifts for Life catalog at their local Church and upon returning home started talking to her family about what they would like to do out of the catalog.

Because they have family members who are beekeepers, they were drawn to the idea of beekeeping as a source of income for areas that are less than ideal for crops and livestock. They decided to support beekeeping initiatives and to do it in honor of our former board member and his wife.

As the mother sat down to the computer to place the order on line, an envelope appeared on the kitchen table with $80.00 in it and a request from the daughter of the family to donate the money for a child orphaned by AIDS so that that child could go to school and have other necessities of life. The daughter wanted the funds “for a child like me.”

This is a big family—with eight mouths to feed, and everything they have goes to that. The children don’t get allowances or money, except for the things they need for school. The family makes ends meet, but much more than that is not usually possible. Needless to say, the mother was taken aback.

The money that the daughter donated was part of the small amount of money she earns when she baby sits outside of the home. The gift that she gave was a large percentage of what she had saved up over the year. It was a gift out of funds that she might otherwise have used to buy herself a fun t-shirt or other small luxury. This was not money that came from a lot, but money that came from a little.

We can all see Christ working within the lives of young people showing us all how to live a life of abundance, even in times of scarcity.

Please send me your stories about how young people or children you know live Christ-like lives among us and we’ll try to post as many as we can.

Over the last several weeks, I have been reading Global Development 2.0 (Lael Brainard and Derek Chollet, editors, published by the Brookings Institution, 2008) which asks the question: “Can Philanthropists, the Public and the Poor Make Poverty History?”

The book comes to the conclusion that, as our President-elect would say, “Yes, we can.”

The book, in twelve chapters by twelve different authors, lays out the argument that to Make Poverty History will require unusual and at times uncomfortable alliances between the public and private sectors, between the traditional players and the new players, businesses and not-for-profits.

For my money, the best chapter in the book is the second one, “Fighting Global Poverty: Who Will Be Relevant in 2020?” (And, no, it’s not because I make a cameo appearance.)

The reason it is the best chapter is that it takes the reader on a journey through all the players and their motivations. It explained a lot to me about what I experience every day in my job as president of Episcopal Relief & Development, but am struggling to navigate. How is one meant to engage all of the old and new players with their different strengths and weaknesses, which now include the government, celebrities, billionaires, foundations, corporations, and social entrepreneurs?

Let’s assume that all of these players come to the table with the same primary objective: fighting poverty. In my experience the challenges arise in the secondary objectives. What do I mean by that?

Take Episcopal Relief & Development—we want to fight poverty—that is our mission. However, we have very clear views about the best way for us to do that. Namely, we want to empower our global church partners to fight poverty in their local context. We therefore are willing to invest in capacity building and institutional development with our church partners. We believe that the payoff in program sustainability and long term impact is worth that investment. We are strengthening the church’s ability to carry out its mission to serve the poor. That is our secondary objective.

The U.S. government through its aid programs also wants to fight poverty. It also wants to advance U.S. interests and that has an impact on how and where it chooses to fight poverty. Celebrities what to fight poverty, but they also want to burnish their “brand” to their audiences. Corporations want to join the fight against poverty, but they also sometimes want to advance business objectives as well.

None of this is necessarily bad. We just need to be transparent about it.

More importantly, and for this I credit the “new philanthropists,” we all need to be focused on impact. If everyone can become aligned around impact, the secondary objectives of each of these parties recedes into the background.

My one critique of the book, is that I’m not sure the editors give the faith community enough credit. Indeed, Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life, is quoted making this point in the book. However, the editors never pick up on it. I think that faith-based initiatives get discounted or overlooked. Why is this? Perhaps it is because faith-based initiatives are often very heavily volunteer driven and thus seen as non-professional. Partially it may be because they are not spending huge amounts of money blowing their own horns and in many instances are trying not to leave foot prints. Faith-based initiatives and organizations are often uncomfortable proclaiming their servant hood. That’s a good thing, but it does often mean that faith-based initiatives are not always at the table when discussing how we are going to Make Poverty History.

President Bush, to his credit, understood the importance of engaging the faith community in the battle against poverty—both in the U.S. and abroad. I expect that President-elect Obama, with his background in community organizing and ties to the faith community, also understands this.

Let’s hope so, because it is going to take EVERYONE to Make Poverty History.