Pilot Project Progress Part 2: Appreciating Assets

Had any of you magically been whisked away to Nairobi last Wednesday night to visit the Rhodes household you might have been surprised at what you would have found. Two very stressed 20-somethings scribbling on poster boards, bickering about whose job it was to figure out how to say "values" in Swahili, and generally running around like chickens recently departed from their heads. Preparing for the first day with a new pilot project turned out to be a bit like getting ready for the first day of school. And we both slept just as poorly.

"Not with bang, but with a whimper." That's what T.S. Eliot said about the world's ending, but it fit quite well with our pilot beginning. When we arrived with our new coworker Beth at the beautifully shady grove of trees where the meeting was to be held, we found literally nobody (we were a bit early). But slowly and surely people streamed in, walking or on bikes, clearly having just left their farms or cows or other morning work. By the end of the day, 13 of 17 people made it, which isn't bad for the first day!

More importantly than the turn up, though, was the meeting itself, which was a complete success. The overall goal of the pilot project is to help a group of farmers to be able to collectively produce and sell a crop with a good market, while also learning the skills to know how to read the market and respond to its changes and fluctuations. But we didn't start with marketing trainings, or giving the group a crop to grow and a lesson on how to grow it. In fact we didn't really do any training at all.

That's because in this project we're trying to begin where the Bible itself begins: the story of God making human beings in His own image. If we really believe that incredible truth, then we have to treat every single human being as if they have value, skills, abilities . . . in short, that they have assets that God has given them to be managed and stewarded in His world. And while almost every Christian would agree, most of the time the way we think about the poor comes from the implicit idea that the poor simply lack things, whether money, knowledge, character . . . whatever. And when that's our implicit idea, whether we like it or not, that's what gets communicated to the poor people we try to work with.

But don't people really need knowledge, capital, food? Of course we all have needs. But, as Brian Fikkert and Steve Corbett have explained in their excellent new book When Helping Hurts (everyone should read it!), a Biblical view of poverty centers around broken relationships with God, with ones self, with others, and with creation. And whether it's inner-city Memphis or rural Kenya, one thing that all poor communities face is the consistent implicit message from the non-poor world that they're messed up, worthless, powerless, vulnerable, stupid, and incapable of change. The government, many NGOs, sometimes even the church, as well as the Primary School of Everyday Experience all teach poor people that they matter less than the rich, that their problems are their fault, and there really isn't much they can do about it. And when outsiders come in with programs that treat the poor as people lacking resources, it simply reinforces the lies they've been told, inadvertently reducing that individual or community's ability to really make changes in their own lives.

But the truth of the Scriptures that conquers the lie is that God has given every person His image! And that means that every one of us has assets and skills that we can use. And so in this pilot project, our primary objective is to help community members use their own assets and resources to study the market, to design a business plan, and to execute that plan to gain a profit.

So on Thursday, we started the whole process with two funny things: drawing maps and telling stories. You see, if we really want this project to be about helping the poor recognize their assets and empowering them to use it to address the problems and opportunities they themselve identify, we wanted to start with activities that would help us do just that. So Rebecca opened up the entire meeting by explaining that we believe that every person has God-given assets and abilities, and that we wanted to begin by learning about what assets God had given this community. She did an excellent job of explaining how every stage of the project would flow out of this foundational idea: God has given you the ability to make changes for the good in your community.

We then began with a Participatory Learning and Action (PLA) activity. PLA is a set of tools that community workers have used for a number of years to help a community process its own resources, opportunities, and problems. The foundational assumption is that community members are the experts on their communities, and that by getting them talking and thinking, an NGO can empower them to begin using their resources and abilities to address their own needs, all while affirming the Biblical message of being made in God's image.

Our first PLA activity, led by our coworker Beth, was a simple community map. The idea is remarkably simple: Beth merely asked the group to create a map of their community, emphasizing local physical resources. But what followed was extraordinary to watch. All 13 community members began scratching and drawing in the dust, gathering sheaves of corn to make crosses to represent churches and rocks for schools, and discussing in great detail all of the physical resources in their community. These included the irrigation project that they began, and also highlighted some limiting infrastructure issues, including far off markets, and a ferry that doesn't operate year round. Not only was this incredibly fun to watch, not only did it encourage every person to be involved, but it got all of them thinking about how resource rich their community really is, and it taught us a whole lot about the area where we're working.

Our second activity comes from a set of methods known as Appreciative Inquiry. The foundational assumption behind Appreciative Inquiry is that every functioning community is a miracle. The fact that people exist in community is a sign that God is working, that people have found a way to overcome obstacles, to work together. Appreciative Inquiry allows a facilitator to help community members form action plans based on their analysis of their own assets and strengths. And AI begins with something everybody loves: stories.

So after the mapping, I explained to the group that before we could begin to think about where we are going, we had to remember where we were, where we had come from. I told them that our project was all about them using their strengths, abilities, and successes to come up with a plan on how to keep moving towards their dreams. And then, I just started asking for people to tell stories. "Tell me a story about a time when you were proud of your community?" "About a time when you tried something new on your farm and succeeded?" "About a time when you faced an obstacle and overcame it?" As people would tell stories, I asked one of the young women in the group to write a few words about the story, and then I would walk through the process of analyzing the strengths, values, and enabling conditions present in the story. For instance, when one man told the story of how he had wanted to get married in a church, and the community pulled together to help him be able to pay for it, we said that the story showed the community was strong in unity, friendship, and love, that they obviously valued family, marriage, and following God's laws, and that in order to have had that experience, they had to have jobs, money, the willingness to help one another, etc. We did the same process with the stories about the man who started selling watermelons as soon as they arrived in the area, and sold them in a far away market, or for the person who told the story about traveling far away to learn how to grow rice, and taking the risk to try it in their own home place.

At the end of the day, the community had spent several hours talking only about their successes, only about their resources, only about the encouraging moments and powerful aspects of their community. Maybe some people think all of this is silly, but after years of development in the 2/3rds World and increasing Welfare states in the West, we believe it is something to begin where God does: that people matter, and that He's given all of us skills, abilities, and assets to manage and use for His glory. This is the beginning and heart of community development, and it was absolutely amazing to see it in action. And maybe, just maybe, it gave us the foundation, the starting point, to walk together with these farmers all the way towards sustainable agricultural business. We'll see.

Peace,
Michael