COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT FORUM: Equipping the local church

November 27, 2014 By Mission:Work

The Patheos Faith and Work Channel recently contacted leaders of some prominent community development and entrepreneurial organizations to talk about successes and difficulties in their attempts to transform communities through the growth of new businesses and attention to the dignity of work. Over the next few days, just in time for Thanksgiving, MISSION:WORK will be featuring their stories. Here is the fourth.

By David Spickard, Jobs For Life

What is the basic mission of Jobs for Life and how did it come about?

Our mission is to engage and equip local churches to address the impacts of joblessness through the dignity of work. We started in Raleigh, NC in 1996 through the relationship between Chris Mangum who owned CC Mangum Company and Pastor Donald McCoy of Pleasant Hill United Church of Christ, a small African-American church. Chris’s company had paved Pastor McCoy’s church’s parking lot, and through that project, they became friends and decided to meet for lunch each week. During one of those lunches, Chris shared with Pastor McCoy several of his company’s large trucks were sitting parked in his company’s parking lot because he could not find good drivers. Pastor McCoy responded by saying, “I have able bodied men and women in my church and community who are parked just like your trucks because they don’t have a job. They come to our Sunday service homeless, unemployed and underemployed, but no matter how hard I preach the gospel to them, they walk out homeless, unemployed, and underemployed, saying Pastor, I need a job.” In that moment, the concept of Jobs for Life was born.

Chris and Pastor McCoy realized they had something the other needed and they committed to gather 12 business friends and 12 pastors together to see if they had the same needs. Sure enough, during the gathering, a businessman raised his hand and said “I have an open position and we need somebody today.” A pastor responded by saying he knew the exact person for that job. They began to place persons in jobs through relationships, but they learned quickly it was one thing to help someone get a job, quite another to help them keep it. Many people had physical, emotional, and spiritual barriers preventing them from being an effective employee and all God had created them to be. To overcome these barriers, they created what is now the Jobs for Life class – a strategy to mobilize local churches and ministries to teach people a biblical perspective of work, connect them to life giving mentor relationships, and help them find and keep meaningful employment.

Now in 275 cities and 10 countries, JfL classes are being held in urban and suburban churches across race and denomination as well as Christ-centered ministries like prison reentry programs, rescue missions, YMCAs, and programs for at-risk youth. Ultimately we’re trying to equip the church to move beyond temporary assistance of the poor and engage them in ways that deepen relationships and help them take care of themselves and their families.

We talk a lot about “flipping the list.” Based on a study done at Duke University, the top way the Church engages in outreach to the materially poor in America is food, the 2^nd housing, the 3^rd clothing. Only 2% of American churches do programs related to work and helping people find jobs. What if work were on top of that list?

How have work opportunities and other social projects from your networks actually transformed communities?

We reach about 5,500 people a year. One woman in Alabama named Joy grew up a child of a single mom living on public assistance. Her mom sent her to her grandparents for help, but her grandfather would molest her every time in order for her to get help. Joy grew up in a world of prostitution and drugs, had 6 kids with 5 fathers, and eventually started dealing drugs and got arrested. She encountered a group of women teaching Bible studies in the jail who wanted to do something to help the women transition out of jail. The group ran a JfL class in the jail and used that to connect relationally. Joy was in the class and really connected; she developed a deep relationship with her mentor Margie. They are now lifelong friends. Joy is out of jail, working full time, has a home with her kids, and is teaching a JfL class in the same jail where she had been incarcerated.

Another success story is Dwight, who was in prison for 29 years. When he got out of prison, for a few years he couldn’t get a job. He took a JfL class in a suburban church in Raleigh. One of the businesses that came to class to present had an opening cleaning offices. He pursued this, and loved it so much that he now has his own cleaning business.

These stories don’t fully capture what happens in a local church as well. Once you engage folks around work and help them understand a Biblical perspective of work for themselves, many people in the church grow in their understanding of their own poverty and how God has positioned them in their own work for His glory. Also, once you have helped someone find and keep a job, it makes you feel much differently about the kind of temporary forms of outreach churches have been doing.

Businesspeople also become engaged at a deeper level. Some of our best instructors are CEOs of companies now positioned to teach a Biblical view of work. They recognize the value of the folks in the class and open up their networks on behalf of the students. Finding and keeping a job is so much who you know; the materially poor don’t have those networks. The church is a built-in network we can mobilize on behalf of those in need. Businesses are now thinking of entrepreneurship in communities that are under-resourced and need jobs. Businesspeople have become creative with job creation and entrepreneurship.

Have there been any failures in the process, and what instructive lessons did you take from them?

There are several challenges. One is to keep our eyes focused on equipping and engaging the local church, making sure everything we do is done through the local church. Mistakes have been made when we do work the church is designed to do, or create infrastructure through our work that inhibits the local church. There’s a difference between creating a platform for the church to do the work it’s called to do, unleashing and empowering, versus being the platform and asking for the church’s help, being the solution and asking the church to help us do our work. We’re constantly trying to evaluate whether we’re crossing that line.

The church in my lifetime has been predisposed to the idea that we have systems and structures in place to deal with those in need, like government programs and nonprofits. It’s in the church’s DNA to say “We’re not equipped to do that, we need to use the professionals”. We’ve found over and over again that the church is fully equipped, full of people who are able to walk with people in need, transform their lives, and have their own lives transformed as well.

Also, there’s a different expectation of time. We can think results are going to happen more quickly than they do, and not always build strategies to last over the long haul. We’re beginning to talk about having a generational time frame. There’s an urgency to be engaged in the work today, but the ultimate impact may not be realized until the lifetimes of our children’s children.

Learn more about Jobs for Life here.

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COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT FORUM: Changing one neighborhood

November 26, 2014 By Mission:Work

977658_10152047646684922_1202260364_o — Jim and his wife Jolyn

By Jim Wehner, Focused Community Strategies Urban Ministries

How did FCS come about? What is its mission?

Focused Community Strategies is a neighborhood based community development group. We partner with underserved neighborhoods to work on issues within the community, addressing poverty and development and producing a self-standing neighborhood revitalization. We have a single-neighborhood focus, although we do a lot of consulting and training with other organizations to do this in their own places. Our neighborhood is historic south Atlanta: about 9 blocks by 7 blocks, 3000 people, 550 single family homes, a couple of multi-family buildings, and commercial businesses.

How have work opportunities and other social projects from your networks actually transformed communities?

We have three programs to provide affordable housing to the neighborhood. We’ve studied how much low-income and rental housing a neighborhood can sustain and how much home ownership it needs. We’ve been able to move the percentage of home ownership from 15% to almost 40%: transitioning from solely low-income rental towards more of a mixed-income neighborhood. Then the quality of housing comes up, families stabilize, new people come into the neighborhood who are able to get housing themselves, not through us.

We’ve opened a thrift shop and coffeeshop and bike shop in neighborhood. We’re trying to sustain the thrift shop, but the coffee shop has become a bright spot. It’s the most positive gathering spot in the neighborhood and is about a year and a half away from being self-sustaining. It employs people from the neighborhood; 7 people total are employed at the coffeeshop and thrift store. We are training and preparing folks with a marketable skill, so that they could transition to the restaurant industry most probably, but certainly work in the broader economy. 3 kids left to go to college this last fall, and work at the coffeeshop was integral to them finishing high school and getting off to college.

We think one-sided charitable giving, if it never has to ask the question about dignity of recipient, then it never has to empower or build the personal dignity of the recipient. Almost all ministry that we do we are asking that development question: how are we empowering this person, how are we strengthening their capacity. Over time that’s how you make a difference.

Any failures in the process, and what instructive lessons did you take from them?

Our bike shop is a youth development organization, but lots of youth who have started with it have chosen to go another direction. The pull of the streets is powerful and heartbreaking. Another situation was a family who started with the housing program. We got them a 20-year no-interest loan (after home ownership training). Then they stopped paying the mortgage, and got two really nice cars; the cars were a more important symbol of success. We hold people accountable for decisions, we won’t keep giving assistance towards a house if they’re not making good choices for stability. Last week had to let an employee go who had worked in the thrift store for two years. We coached and coached, worked and worked, but she started to spiral. Folks are waiting for these jobs and had to let her go. These kinds of decisions happen regularly. It’s a long-term viewpoint; there are no quick fixes.

Learn more about FCS here.

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COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT FORUM: Growing new ideas

November 25, 2014 By Mission:Work

By Brian Jones of Innové Project

How did Innové come about? What is its mission?

The name Innové means “breaking new ground.” Colonial Church had a windfall of money set aside for mission, but didn’t want to do mission in the conventional sense. We are in an affluent suburb, often called “the church where all the businesspeople go.” We’re sitting on a mountain of HR potential and wanted to leverage skills that people had in 9-5 jobs. So we created a $250,000 contest for entrepreneurial projects. The congregation are 100 % of the skills trainers.

We intentionally focused the program outside of the church walls. Our parameters are first that the person or organization needs to be in the Twin Cities area—the program has a strong mentoring/coaching element, so we want them present locally. Then, they need to be 35 or younger; we want to focus on millennials and pair them up with boomers for coaching. Older folks may have better networks they can tap into.

We got the money in 2012; our first round of the program was in 2013 and we had 139 applicants. Out of those we selected 5 “protégés” and have an incubation task force that walks along with them.

How have work opportunities and other social projects from your networks actually transformed communities?

Out of our 5 winners, we had four ideas in the planning stage and one group that had run a small pilot program (they were in one school originally and now in 25; we were able to help them scale from 60 students to 1700 students).

One project just launched last month. Its mission is to provide independent living with kids with disabilities. We helped them get from nothing to their launch. Another is called Twin Cities Mobile Market. Minneapolis has a lot of food deserts. We helped them convert a city bus into a grocery store on wheels. We just got the retrofitting (taking out seats, putting in freezers) done after 11 mos.

Any failures in the process, and what instructive lessons did you take from them?

Generally we are thrilled with how well it has worked. We were very cautious in our launch and really wrestled with details. One issue that arose was that we have CEOS in our congregation, and we thought we would have them be the mentors. Someone said “No, CEOS make horrible mentors, they are used to bossing people around.” So we separated mentors into two groups. Navigators walk with the people, care about the people as much as the idea, and facilitate relationships. The CEOS are skill coaches, who “air drop in” for 90 minutes at a time (such as a high-powered attorney to help a startup with a specific legal program.)

The ego of the boomer and the energy of the millennial can sometimes be oil and water. That’s one of our greatest successes, but has also been difficult; it’s a tension that we’ve had to navigate.

Learn more about Innové here. Applications for the second round of grants are due January 5^th, 2015.

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Creating worldwide jobs

COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT FORUM: Creating worldwide jobs

November 24, 2014 By Mission:Work

By Rudy Carrasco of Partners Worldwide

How did Partners Worldwide come about? What is its mission?

Partners Worldwide mobilizes long-term, hands-on global relationships to form a powerful Christian network that uses business as the way to create flourishing economic environments in all parts of the world. In the 2013-14 fiscal year the local community institutions in our 25-country network created and sustained 90,603 jobs.

In 1994, Partners for Christian Development, now Partners Worldwide, was formed when Kenyan and American businesspeople met to establish a loan fund for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), a business savings and loan cooperative, and partnerships between entrepreneurs. We began with a simple question: “Is there a way for businesspeople to become a part of the solution to ending poverty, instead of being seen as part of the problem?”

How have work opportunities and other social projects from your networks actually transformed communities?

Partners Worldwide has 70+ groups embedded in local communities in our networks. These are called LCIs (local community institutions). They are independent nonprofits/NGOs and are affiliated with us through partnership agreements. In the United States we have 7 active LCIs.

Transformation story #1 – Julius Burrows of Chattanooga, TN, received business training and mentoring through LAUNCH, a Partners Worldwide LCI. He had been in prison five years and was working multiple jobs, trying to make ends meet, when he entered LAUNCH’s program. Today he owns a mobile food truck, All Dogs Funnel Cakes and More, that grossed $120,000+ over a 12-month period after startup. He has also facilitated a business training class for another group of entrepreneurs. LAUNCH, over its initial three years in existence, has helped start 71 businesses that in total represent 106 jobs. Here’s a story about Julius.

Transformation story #2 – Stella Sanchez went through business training at the Center for Peace – another PW LCI – in Victoria, TX. She struggled with addiction for years. As part of the leadership of Center for Peace, Stella planned and launched her business, Stella’s Sassy Salsa. Here’s a story about Stella.

Transformation story #3 – In a south side Chicago community with more than 20% unemployment, Sunshine Gospel Ministries opened Greenline Coffee, a high end coffee shop, this summer. Sunshine is a PW LCI and is committed to creating more than 200 jobs along 61st Street in their community. Greenline is a forprofit coffee shop – a business – and employs many youth from the community. ABC News covered Greenline Coffee recently (video here).

Any failures in the process, and what instructive lessons did you take from them?

In 17 years of existence, with thousands of businesses involved with our 70+ LCIs, there are many failure, hiccups, and pivots. One of them is recorded in our book – My Business, My Mission: Fighting Poverty Through Partnerships – and takes place in the Philippines. Local leadership changed hands, there were not enough “noses in” to the new leadership’s processes, and the result was eventual weakening of the local business group. Doug Seebeck says, “Nothing can substitute for accountability, supervision, communication, and working shoulder to shoulder. In retrospect, it is clear that we took our eyes off the ball.”

Learn more about Partners Worldwide here.

COMMUNITY DEVLOPMENT FORUM: Shining God’s light on a corner

November 28, 2014 By Mission:Work

The Patheos Faith and Work Channel recently contacted leaders of some prominent community development and entrepreneurial organizations to talk about successes and difficulties in their attempts to transform communities through the growth of new businesses and attention to the dignity of work. Over the last few days, just in time for Thanksgiving, MISSION:WORK has been featuring their stories. Here is the final story.

By Joel Hamernick, Sunshine Gospel Ministries (note: you can also read about how SGM has worked with Partners Worldwide in our Monday post)

What is the basic mission of Sunshine Gospel Ministries and how did it come about?

It’s a 109-year old faith-based ministry, always in Chicago and only Chicago. It’s always been about ministry of the gospel in the city and among the poor, but there have been evolutions within that basic idea. For the past 50 years it has been primary a youth outreach ministry, with spiritual and academic goals for at-risk kids.

We had been in Cabrini Green, but when the city tore down the public housing there, we relocated into a neighborhood on the South Side called Woodlawn and started the whole thing over. We maintained our focus on youth (200 youth in the neighborhood year round), added mission trips (400-500 outside youth during spring break and summer), and are also now a business incubator. We started a coffeeshop with an impact investment strategy, not philanthropic dollars. Now it’s a separate entity entirely from Sunshine; as a tenant it rents space from us and employs 12 people from the community.

We have two strategies for incubating a business. One, which we did with the coffeeshop, is when we think we can actually start the business—raising capital, putting a business plan together, getting investors—but one a year of those would be a lot. So ns really our core strategy, is to identify existing low-income entrepreneur and businesses, and come alongside those and help them. We have businesses in the service sector: child care, hair care, party planning, mural painting, and window washing/cleaning. We have some that are product based: one that produces shirts and T-shirts, one custom shoes; and one that is food-based: baking cookies and selling them.

How have work opportunities and other projects sponsored/funded/incubated by SGM actually transformed communities?

We’ve had 21 jobs created in the past year, 12 through the coffeeshop and the rest through other entrepreneurs. Certainly our most visible aspect is Greenline Coffee. It’s transformed a corner from being a vacant abandoned building with difficulties to being a community gathering spot and a really beautiful place. We even now have live music.

Calvin Brown’s window washing company is a great success. He’s gotten some small business loans through KIVA and has 12 part-time employees working for him as he’s trying to expand the business. Jittaun Priest, a mural painter, did the mural at Greenline. SGM has now connected her with the University of Chicago, other markets for her art, and a mentor.

Have there been any failures in the process, and what instructive lessons did you take from them?

Articulating a vision for work in the Christian community and being able to raise support and awareness is in some ways the hardest part. Identifying people, establishing a level of trust, getting down to the nitty gritty of helping them grow their business—to do that we need relationships with mature Christians. Everyone in theory wants to move from a give-a-man-a-fish strategy to a teach-a-man-to-fish strategy, but we constantly need to articulate that this really is about the kingdom. The everyday work of people’s hands is how God extends common grace in the world. People think there is a disconnect. They say “You were a gospel ministry and now you’re focusing on work?” Evangelicals need to have a conversation about what it means to be made in the image of God and designed for work.

We see this as a very, very long-term strategy. We’re going slow, but over time will work with 100s and 100s of small businesses. We want to build relationships with churches, we want established Christian marketplace professionals to mentor and coach the people they work with, and we want the larger conversation about Christian ministry among the poor to focus on enterprise and work, and to be something that people can get involved in on a practical level.

Learn more about SGM here.

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Meet Dale: A Tale of Perseverance and Love

August 16, 2015 By Guest Contributor

This post is reprinted from Marion Be The Change, a community development and advocacy organization in Marion, IN “aimed at giving those living in poverty a voice, while seeking tangible solutions to improve their lives.” The organization focuses on talking seriously with those in poverty to hear their own stories and suggestions. Check out some other organizations doing similar work in our community development forum last November, and stay tuned for more posts from MBTC from time to time.

It was the mid 1970s and Dale was sitting in his parents’ station wagon, which was parked behind his house. He was five years old, and he nervously lit a cigar. His curiosity about smoking had been aroused the previous week. He had sat in the back seat of his parents’ car while his father drove from Ohio to Colorado to visit his uncle who was serving in the Air Force. His father smoked cigars the whole way there and back. Dale figured out how to light the cigar and take a few short awkward puffs, when he heard a noise. Scared that he might get caught, he attempted to put out the cigar in the ash tray. He must have missed in his hurry, and the floor board of the station wagon caught fire. Dale ran out into the neighborhood.

Luckily for Dale, his nine-year-old brother, Kyle, was the prime suspect. He had been caught smoking the week before, so when his parents found his brother they accused him without question. They grounded Dale’s brother for the summer and sent him to his room. Kyle was merciless when he finally found Dale upstairs in a bedroom in the family’s home. Kyle backed Dale into a corner and said angrily, “I’ll throw you out of this window and kill you. I never liked you anyway because you are adopted like me.”

Dale was devastated. His brother must have thought that he caused Dale enough injuries through his words because Dale was able to get away. He went downstairs and asked his mother if Kyle’s words were true, and that is how he found out that he was not his parents’ biological child.

He was told that his mother was 14 years old when she gave birth to Dale. She lived in a boarding home for unwed teenage mothers. Dale was saddened and stunned by the news. A short time later he remembered watching Bambi , and he went to his room and cried. His mother asked him why he was crying, and he said, “I am just like Bambi. My mother died too.”

Around this same time, Kyle started to sexually molest Dale and shortly thereafter, he was molested by the father of one of the kids on his baseball team. Soon after that, Dale’s parents divorced.Dale said that for some reason he was always deeply spiritual. He always had a sense that God existed. He said that he would sit in his backyard watching the clouds move across the sky and say, “God, I know that you are real.” He joined the Boy Scouts and went to a Methodist Church for a meeting. He said that he was compelled by pictures of Jesus. He said, “I knew that God was there, but I just didn’t know if he was there for me.”

Throughout Dale’s adolescence and into early adulthood his actions were consistent with his deep-rooted belief that God was there but not for him.

Adolescence

Dale said that he always wanted to be a good kid, but he constantly got the message, from both society and his inner voice, that he was deficient. He recalls having repeated nightmares in which he was falling, and he just didn’t feel like he could succeed. He also remembers going on vacations and trips as a child and desperately wanting to move to another location, so that he could get a new start.

He recalled a time when he studied hard for a spelling test. He went to school anticipating that he would do well, and he took the test. When he got the paper back from the teacher, he saw that he had scored 50% — an F. Dale felt like a complete failure. As is the case with many children who are abused, Dale’s failures came to define him. He did not just do poorly on a spelling test. In his mind, he failed one more time in life, so he must be a failure. Dale went home immediately and wrote out all of the words. This time, he scored 100%. Dale had no way of knowing that he was experiencing performance anxiety. None of us have that kind of insight as children; we have to be informed by loving adults. Dale felt like most of the adults in his life did not think that he was worth their investment.

Soon, Dale began to have more problems. He hung out with older friends. He said, “I just liked the music they listened to better, and I seemed to relate to older kids better.” I wonder if Dale’s experiences and the ensuing pain just made him a little more mature than kids his own age. Sometimes child’s play seems stupid, when one has to grow up fast. Dale also said that he looked up to his brother, even though Kyle was molesting him. His brother was a pole vaulter and on the varsity basketball team, so he had a lot of friends. While Dale was hanging out with these older people, he began getting them alcohol and weed, which would later get him into trouble.

Not fitting in with children his age, not trusting that the adults in his life had his best interests in mind, and coping through alcohol, tobacco and drugs was a destructive combination. Dale recalls that he was sent away to a group home and later he was put on “diversion,” which was the equivalent to probation for kids. Dale did not get into legal trouble for selling drugs. He got sent away for being insubordinate with his father. He recalls an incident when he went home intoxicated and said that he was going to a bar, where the local owner would let him hang out despite his age. Dale’s father refused to give him money because he knew how Dale would spend it, and Dale got angry and threw a bowling pin at him. Although the bowling pin missed its intended target and stuck in the wall, his father called the police. The result was that he was sent to a juvenile penitentiary, where he remained until he turned 18.

That One Adult

There was a family friend that took Dale under her wing when he was a child. She was a teacher in Chicago. She took the Chicago city train “the L” every day to a school in one of the roughest neighborhoods. He remembers a time when he went to visit her, and they went to a WWF wrestling match. He was able to meet Mr. T because he was one of the at-risk youth that she influenced as a child. Dale asked her if he could move in with her to get the new start he wanted. She said that it would not be safe for Dale to live in her neighborhood, and her commute and teaching duties made it impossible for her to watch him. Dale still says affectionately, “I knew she loved me.”

That One Talent

The one thing that Dale could do successfully was play baseball. He played shortstop, and he held about a .323 batting average in Pony League. Dale said that spectators were impressed because he only weighed about 80 pounds and stood 5’2″. Despite his talent, he couldn’t play in high school because he didn’t earn the required grades. One day he was standing outside of the dugout smoking a Marlboro, when a man came up to him and said, “I was going to ask you to come to my college, but you can’t be smoking. I think you lost your chance.” Dale said, “#$%^& you!” and his teammates said, “Don’t you know who that is? That is the coach of the Cincinnati Bearcats. He came to watch you play.” Dale felt dejected.

The Last Straw

Dale was in a tenth grade science class, when his teacher, Mr. Adams, asked him if he needed a cigarette. Dale said that he could tell from the teacher’s tone that he was trying to humiliate him. He already felt like the butt of everyones’ jokes and now he felt like his teacher had joined sides with the students who treated him like an outcast. He said that the students laughed when he went outside and stood by the classroom window and smoked a cigarette. The next day, Dale dropped out of school. He said, “I figured if the teacher didn’t care about me, I didn’t care about myself either.” Dale was 17 and did not think that he would graduate anyway because he had already been held back, and he had low grades.(Read more of Dale’s story on the next page!)