People living in poverty are creative and smart – and we can work with those strengths

Baptist World Aid

Australia’s Baptists sponsor 5,000 children in majority-world countries in Africa and Asia through Baptist World Aid Australia (BWAA), the largest branch of that global network of aid agencies.

That is something for Australian Baptists to be proud of. But in a conversation with Melissa Lipsett, the CEO of BWAA, The Other Cheek discovers that there’s a much more radical approach to aid going on. It’s about wiping out any remaining vestiges of thinking that as Aussies sending aid, we are any more worthy than the communities we want to help.

Speaking just after returning from Africa, Lipsett told The Other Cheek, “Obviously, parts of Africa are very confronting in terms of the level of poverty, which has only been exacerbated across this last period with the level of conflict and displacement of people because of conflict, but also the displacement of people because of climate change, Lipsett pointed out. “But in the midst of that, I’m reminded yet again that people living in very vulnerable circumstances are smart and creative and incredibly resilient. And we have the privilege and the responsibility of coming alongside them and just being able to provide that small amount of resource that is needed for them to be able to take next steps themselves.”

We (well, certainly this writer) easily fall back on thinking that it’s our “strengths” of wealth and resources that count. But Lipsett points to the resources of those we might help. “The best intervention is not for us to go in as Westerners thinking that we know what the best intervention is. We never do. So it becomes about coming alongside local communities and listening very, very carefully to them, often for a very long period of time, and helping them to identify their strengths.

“Weakness is very obvious. You don’t have to search very hard. It is pretty clear what the weakness is. And usually that’s just around the situation of poverty, often driven by systems of injustice. Of course, nothing to do with their own making, but the most important thing to do is to identify strength, and we identify community strength. What is it that you could do to together that you can’t do, a part that you can’t do as individuals? So our model of working is to bring people together, help them to identify their strengths, and help them to identify what is it that they want to change and that they have the capacity to do together. ”  

In case that sounds abstract (and Lipsett is careful not to exclude emergency aid situations when physical resources need to be rushed in), the conversation goes to specific examples of responding to communities.

She starts with an example that provided a physical resource rather than a strengths-based approach. “Last week, one of the things that I did see was I was thrilled to be able to go to the opening of a water bore because water of course is crucial. And this particular community had previously had to travel four hours a day to get water and four hours a day. It means that you lose a lot of time in terms of school or growing vegetables, looking after your livestock, cooking, cleaning the things that you need to do to manage a family or manage your education. So eliminating that four hours by putting a water bore into the community is a good example of physical resource being incredibly necessary because that then frees up that energy, creativity and resilience for something else. “

That strengths-based theme is reflected in her next example. “We have a model of working with the local church. For instance, local churches are embedded in local communities right across the globe, and they’re not going anywhere. NGOs will come and go, but the local church will always be there. So we partner very, very locally with organisations like the local church or like-minded, grassroots NGOs that often have come out of the local church. 

“And essentially what we’re doing there is we’re paying wages, but that allows them to work in that local context that they know so well. And then it’s a bringing together of people. One of the examples from last week was that I met with two women’s groups, self-help community groups, but they’re led by local partner staff, and they were communities of refugee women. So they’ve come together, young moms, actually. There were lots and lots of babies as well, John. I loved it. But those women have come together to learn ‘how do we live in this country?’ ‘How do we bring, bring up our children in this country?’ ‘How do we best feed ourselves and our families in this country?’ ‘How do we look after our babies?’

“Well, they’ve learned nutrition. They’ve learned how to plant a market, a kitchen garden. Every single one of them has their own kitchen garden. They’ve learned new hygiene techniques because water is scarce. So they’ve learned that it’s best to breastfeed their babies until at least two. What are the most nutritional things to feed my weaning child so that malnutrition and stunting isn’t a problem? And having learned those things in that group, each woman in that group undertakes to share that knowledge with 11 other refugee women. So those groups are actually called ‘cascade groups’. They come together for a year or so.”

Child Sponsorship

The Other Cheek learned two new things about Child Sponsorship. The first was that BWAA aims to be radically impermanent. The idea that generations after generations of children in a community might need to be sponsored is far from the BWAA way of doing things. Instead, community programmes that hang off the sponsorships that Australian Baptists provide aim to mean that the next generation of children in each community won’t need it.

One round of sponsorship should build up the resilience of the sponsored children and their community.

“A very, very inspirational young woman I met last week learned tailoring skills and was able to save for her first sewing machine and now set up business in her local marketplace to be a tailor,” Lipsett said. “She’s now got five sewing machines. She’s got a permanent little space, which is her little store, actually. She’s moved from a smaller space into a bigger space because she’s now taken on trainees. And so she’s now training five other women at a time. Five of us were young women, the same sort of age as her to also take on tailoring. She’s just 21 years old. So a 21-year-old entrepreneur who has successfully trained and sent back into their own communities, women with the ability to be tailors.

“I met another one last week who started down that same journey, but she’s training young men to be tailors. And we actually asked the young men, how do you feel about being trained by a young woman? And they laughed and said that they got lots of teasing about it, but that she was an expert tailor, and they thought that they were pretty lucky to be trained by her. 

“That training, she was training them under a tree. John.”

The other lesson of child sponsorship came about through listening to the wishes of those in the program. BWAA is taking the cute factor out of child sponsorship, becoming the first child sponsorship organisation to no longer use the faces of children and young people for marketing to new sponsors. BWAA will obscure the faces in marketing material using a “sticker” photoshopping a logo over the faces of the children involved.

BWAA have been told by children and young people they don’t want their images to be spread online. “We’ve been doing a lot of intentional listening over these last two years, and we’ve said to them, what more can we do to promote your dignity and privacy? And they’ve told us very clearly that they don’t want to be identified in the same sorts of spaces that we wouldn’t want our own children to be identified.

“So from now forward, we won’t be making the faces of those children and young people AWAI sponsorship available to people until after they have signed up to sponsor that child or young person. So their images won’t be available online or at events. You’d be very familiar with the idea of a booth at a large Christian event with lots of profiles, and there’s this very uncomfortable sense of people choosing children based on what they look like. That won’t be happening for us any longer. People will still be able to say, I’d like to sponsor a child, perhaps a girl who lives in Uganda or Nepal, and we’ll facilitate that, but we will only provide that sponsor with the photograph of that child or young person once they’ve signed up to sponsorship. So that will remain a private arrangement.”

This fits with with changes BWAA has already made on the ground. It is about dignity. One of the changes already made to the BWAA model is to put child and human rights at the centre of it, making those issues part of their community development. “It is not about a child being cared for within a community at the expense of the rest of the community,” Lipsett explained. “It’s actually placing the child or the young person at the centre of the community development that starts with them and emanates out from them. So that all of those other self-help groups in terms of young moms, parenting groups, livelihood groups, they all build around the central child and youth development project in a community.”

So you might think of it as sponsoring a child but ending up with a whole village. 

BWAA Partner staff in Cambodia discussing the change to not using identifying photos in child sponsorship with young people in our programs. Image credit: BWAA