True Charity
- Doing Them Well By Being With Them First: The Power of Presence in Effective Charity
- Achieving Advantageous Outcomes with Self Assessments
- The Power of Collaboration: Strengthen Your Poverty Alleviation Ministry Together
- Helping Without Hurting in Short-Term Missions: A Synopsis
- Respecting Agency and Truth in Relationships
- Five Ways to Improve Children’s Safety at Your Ministry
- A Framework for Flourishing: A Synopsis of When Helping Hurts
- When Social Capital Moves in Next Door: The Best Evidence on Gentrification
- The Maker Versus The Takers: What Jesus Really Said About Social Justice and Economics
- The Emotional and Mental Health Crisis in Poverty
14 Best Practices for Turning a Class Into a Community
You’ve identified some of your clients who could benefit from some new skills. It’s easy to say, “Let’s teach a class.” But let’s be honest, running a class is tough. We’ve collected some advice from experienced leaders and programs so that you can make your class a time of real transformation and community—and something everyone looks forward to.
Choose Support that Doesn’t Crowd, Cramp, and Hurt
Several years ago in a meeting with some city and nonprofit leaders, I shared the need and vision for a long-term recovery center. The idea became a central piece to a ten-year plan to address homelessness. City-government leaders involved in the discussion voted to allocate $500,000 dollars as seed money to realize the new brick-and-mortar project. Some were shocked when we turned it down. Why would anyone turn away half a million dollars of free government money? Because it’s not free.
Three Things You May Not Know About Your Top Donors
It’s no secret that maintaining a strong relationship with your organization’s top donors is paramount to long-term sustainability. It takes intentional effort to ensure those relationships extend beyond a mere exchange of money. Wouldn’t it be helpful to know their thoughts and attitudes about your organization, their resources, and the factors that bring the two together?
Keep Excellence on Track with Operational Reviews
Imagine that you spend months crafting a relational, empowering program at your ministry. You carefully craft a series of questions for clients designed to find their talents and abilities. The person responsible for asking the questions changes out several times and one day you decide to sit in on the process. What was designed as an exercise in personal connection has become quite the opposite – an adversarial bureaucratic process that demeans your client. This happens more often that we know. It’s not enough to design your programs well, or implement them well in a trial run; you must maintain their effectiveness over time.
Approaches to Christmas Gifts: Restoring Dignity
As the holidays approach, many churches and nonprofits run programs to give Christmas gifts to kids in need, and many more partner with existing national programs. The traditional toy drive is simple. Donors buy gifts and volunteers distribute them. The volunteers either go to the homes of the children or have a day of distribution in a central location. Kids smile, donors feel good … everyone’s better off, right? Unfortunately – it’s not that simple.
Approaches to Food Distribution: More Than a Hand-Out
Feeding the hungry is one of the oldest forms of charity and seems like it should be simple. However, as many know from years of practice, even when food is collected, stored, and distributed efficiently, it still may not reduce dependency or change lives.
The good news is that there are innovative approaches to solve the issues created by the standard hand-out model.