Optimistic Voices
Vital voices in the fields of global health, global child welfare reform and family separation, and those intent on conducting ethical missions in low resource communities and developing nations. Join our hosts as they engage in conversations with diverse guests from across the globe, sharing optimistic views, experiences, and suggestions for better and best practices as they discuss these difficult topics.
Optimistic Voices
Measuring What Matters: The Challenge of Defining Empowerment
What does it really mean to empower people? Beyond buzzwords and good intentions lies a complex reality that social impact organizations grapple with daily. This conversation with researchers Dr. Thomas Crea and Dr. Sarah Neville dives deep into the messy, thought-provoking questions that challenge conventional thinking about empowerment.
The discussion takes us beyond simplistic notions of "teaching a man to fish" to examine whether we're creating the fishing holes people need to sustain themselves. As Dr. Crea points out, true empowerment begins when "communities recognize and define the issues affecting them" rather than having external definitions imposed. Yet the structures of international aid, academic research, and nonprofit funding often create barriers to this community-centered approach.
We explore the tension between research that feels extractive and communities' immediate needs for jobs, healthcare, and education. Both researchers share candid reflections on working across contexts from Sierra Leone to Chelsea, Massachusetts, revealing how power dynamics play out similarly whether internationally or locally. The conversation challenges Western individualism through Dr. Neville's observation that "nobody is a self-made person" and questions whether traditional metrics can capture what matters most in human flourishing.
Perhaps most provocatively, we question whether empowerment can be measured at all. Some of the most important outcomes—belonging, dignity, community connection—resist quantification but remain essential. As Dr. Neville notes, "We seem to want short-term, inexpensive solutions to have life-changing, transformative impact," yet meaningful change often requires longer-term investment and humility about what we can
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Travel on International Mission, meet local leadership and work alongside them. Exchange knowledge, learn from one another and be open to personal transformation. Step into a 25 year long story of change for children in some of the poorest regions on Earth.
https://www.helpingchildrenworldwide.org/mission-trips.html
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A bible study for groups and individuals, One Twenty-Seven: The Widow and the Orphan by Dr Andrea Siegel explores the themes of the first chapter of James, and in particular, 1:27. In James, we learn of our duty to the vulnerable in the historical context of the author. Order here or digital download
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Family Empowerment Advocates support the work of family empowerment experts at the Child Reintegration Centre, Sierra Leone. Your small monthly donation, prayers, attention & caring is essential. You advocate for their work to help families bring themselves out of poverty, changing the course of children's lives and lifting up communities. join
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Organize a Rooted in Reality mission experience for your service club, church group, worship team, young adult or adult study. No travel required. Step into the shoes of people in extreme poverty in Sierra Leone, West Africa, Helping Children Worldwide takes you into a world where families are facing impossible choices every day.
Contact support@helpingchildrenworldwide.org to discuss how.
Shout out to our newest sponsor: The Resilience Institute
Helpingchildrenworldwide.org
Welcome to the Optimistic Voices podcast. I am your host, yasmin Vaughn. In today's episode we are going to be talking with two social sector researchers about empowerment. In this special episode we are going to be diving into this quarterly theme of empowerment. We have had some episodes previously with Cherie Reese, who talks about Church of the Resurrection and their approaches to relationships with organizations to ensure that they have local ownership of problems, and in our episode with One Village Partners that we recorded, we discussed how their organization approaches working with local communities to ensure that those communities lead their way in their own development.
Speaker 1:So today we're going gonna be talking a little bit about how to measure empowerment. If your goal is to empower people, then how do you know that you've achieved it, what does it look like, how quickly can you expect to achieve results in that, and how do you communicate those results to donors, supporters, other organizations who are interested in partnering with you? So today's conversation will be a little bit of a departure from our usual format. Rather than our usual Q&A, we're inviting you all our listeners, to join us for a collaborative, honest discussion where we'll be exploring some of the complex questions being raised by nonprofit organizations and people working as researchers, grant writers, program implementers, impact evaluators and really anyone involved in creating a better future. So we'll be opening the curtain on these big questions and the daily realities faced by people who are working in the international development, social impact and global humanitarian aid space. So a couple things that we'll be talking about are empowerment it's a term that we use often, but what does it really mean in practice? So we'll share some of our own ongoing struggles to define it and how that affects the work that we do every day. We'll talk about the challenge of measuring impact, demonstrating value to donors and to stakeholders, especially when the impacts that you're trying to achieve are things that are intangible, sometimes long-term and often very difficult and sometimes impossible to measure with numbers. We'll talk about how we're searching for new ways to have communities drive key decisions rather than being sidelined by top-down approaches. And we'll talk about how poverty and other issues are really complex and deeply rooted and therefore there are no easy answers, and this sector needs to learn how to navigate these challenges with creativity, humility and ongoing collaboration. And, of course, as the funding landscape changes and social impact, organizations are facing unprecedented challenges, we'll explore how organizations are adapting, innovating and rethinking priorities in this time of change. So you'll see a little bit of a behind-the-scenes work. If you're passionate about international development or social change, these conversations will really shed light on those realities faced by organizations around the world. So thanks for joining us, tom and Sarah. I'm going to introduce them a little bit so.
Speaker 1:Dr Thomas Cray is a professor and assistant dean of global programs at the Boston College School of Social Work. He is a former clinical social worker, researching services and systems at the intersections of forced migration, mental health and humanitarian aid and international development. He has worked closely with international non-government organizations such as Jesuit refugee Services, catholic Relief Services, lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, changing the Way we Care and others. His projects have been funded by multiple sources, such as the US Department of Agriculture, the National Institute for Health and private foundations. These projects have spanned multiple countries which, in addition to the US, have included Guatemala, honduras, kenya, malawi, palestine, sierra Leone, south Africa and Zimbabwe. Professor Cray uses mixed methods, participatory research methodologies designed to produce rigorous yet useful findings for stakeholders working with marginalized populations.
Speaker 1:Some of you all may remember our next guest, dr Sarah Neville, is joining us again. She is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Brown University School of Public Health and the Brown Department of Psychiatry and Human Behavior. She has her PhD from Boston College School of Social Work, which she obtained in 2022, where she conducted her dissertation on children reunifying with family after living in residential care institutions in Kenya. Her research is on children and residential care in low and middle-income countries, including strategies for enabling children and institutions to live in safe and nurturing families, preventing them from entering institutions and enhancing their mental health and well-being. She has also worked in several countries, including Sierra Leone, guatemala, china, kenya, liberia and Nigeria. She also has her bachelor's and master's in child development from Tufts University, so thank you both for joining us.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having us.
Speaker 3:Thank you, this is exciting.
Speaker 1:So when we were thinking about putting together this podcast episode, I initially approached you all with a idea of this episode being focused on measuring empowerment, and by the end of our conversation, I think we put together more questions than we had answers. And so today let's go through those questions, talk about why we're thinking about them and then share some examples for our listeners to understand more concretely about the work that we're doing.
Speaker 2:So I'd like it if both of you could start by sharing a little bit more, beyond your bio, about some of the organizations doing social impact work that you've worked with. Sure, I can start. So I've worked for a long time with multiple organizations, as reflected in that bio, mostly faith-based organizations, and I've worked with those organizations in all types of capacities, from doing pro bono work to capacity building and training, to research and evaluation, to policy developments and other things. And in almost every case with the organizations that I've worked with, there is the centralized organization and then there's the community facing organization. There's the community facing organization, and so I'll use Catholic Relief Services and Jesuit Refugee Service as two kind of counterpoints to how they do that.
Speaker 2:So CRS is a very large organization that provides the background work for the local, local organizations to do the work that they're getting the funding to do. Jrs, on the other hand, has a small central international office and then larger peripheral offices. So they have regional offices and country offices and they're really the ones doing the work and they're loosely tied together through this network of JRS. Whereas CRS is highly centralized, everything kind of flows from the center and goes out to the local organization. So those are two different kinds of approaches that I've seen.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and for me, well, was tom's phd student for four years, so we've worked with a lot of the same organizations there. But um, I also well, I I started off actually, uh, before I did my phd I was working at a um education development center, or ed, which is an implementing partner a US-based implementing partner for USAID-funded education contracts and grants, where we would have these local offices that we would open the office when we got the project funded and then we would shut the office down five years later when the project ended. And then during my PhD work, I worked with Changing Way we Care, which is a consortium mostly with Catholic Relief Services, and Maestral International, which is a consulting company that has consultants from all over the world, but a lot in the global north. And then, of course, I worked with you with Helping Children Worldwide In 2022,. You and I were paired by the Christian Alliance for Orphans, where we got that grant so that we could work together and do a research study where I would provide some of the research expertise and do some work evaluating one of your programs, which is really fun, and it's really interesting also being in that group in Christian Alliance for Orphans, or CAFO as we call it, and working with those partners from all around the world, those faith-based partners. But another interesting thing that I've never mentioned so much before to you, but in 2019, actually when I was in the middle of my PhD program I moved to Chelsea, massachusetts, which is a really small city right outside Boston, and we are probably one of them.
Speaker 3:We have probably one of the highest percentages of undocumented residents, lots and lots of immigrant residents, rates of of poverty and and low-income residents, and my husband and I are really involved in the community as local elected officials, but we know all the folks who run the local non-profits and we do some of our own, you know, community organizing and running little things here and there. So I kind of have this dual perspective where, um, I guess I work, I, I I work from as a, as an American person who's working in low income countries, but then when I'm in Chelsea, I kind of see like I'm part of this, this Chelsea community, this, this low income community in Chelsea, and and I work with external folks who are coming in to do research or to to fund programs or whatever, and it's a similar dynamic. So that's interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it's global, it's local, it's glocal. You're facing a lot of different challenges and a lot of different dynamics there as well. And, dr Cray, your work with CRS and Jesuit Relief Services was that focused more internationally or locally, or both?
Speaker 2:Well, I guess it depends on your point of reference. So for me, internationally and I've done a lot of work with JRS in South Africa and Eastern Africa around refugee higher education and education for kids with special needs specific to the context of a refugee camp. And then with CRS, I worked in Zimbabwe with them on a large clinical trial of cash transfers this was years ago and then did large-scale evaluations of their school feeding programs in Guatemala and Honduras. So lots of different parts of the world and very different contexts.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so working in a lot of different places, seeing a lot of different experiences for both of you.
Speaker 2:For sure.
Speaker 1:So we chatted at first a little bit about what does empowerment mean. Just kind of starting off, we're doing an episode on empowerment and how you measure it. Well, what is it? What does it mean to be empowered? What does it mean for individuals, for communities, for countries to be empowered, or even families, taking it back to a lower level? Why do we propose that kind of question? What are your thoughts on that?
Speaker 2:You know, I think for me, empowerment is the ability of individuals or families or communities to recognize and define the issues that are affecting them in the way that makes sense to them and is not externally imposed upon them. But that's only part of it. Then the next piece is how to identify the solutions in a way that makes sense for those the individuals, families or communities to address those problems in a way that is meaningful and appropriate for them. And I think that has a lot of implications for funding structures, for donor priorities and just how our systems are set up or were set up. In many cases, I think a lot of the systems have been dismantled. At this point. We've talked about in the larger humanitarian community, about doing a reset of how we rethink how aid and development are conceptualized and implemented, and I think this is a good space to do that, actually, because in many ways this is a great pause. And during this pause, how can we center the communities as the drivers of the solutions that they are the most invested in?
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I'll also add that there's so many. There's different people have different ways of thinking of what empowerment is, and so you kind of got to get down to the root of what that person thinks that they're saying. When they say empowerment, we can talk about empowering local communities. We can talk about empowering individuals or families. We can even talk about empowering local organizations and, sometimes, people. When they talk about empowerment, what they really want is to be sharing power and making sure that, as Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley says, the people closest to the pain are the people holding the power.
Speaker 3:And sometimes, when people talk about empowerment, I think they're also talking about getting people off of assistance. So they're like I want to empower this individual to, you know, learn how to fish for themselves, so that they're not, um, just just taking fish from the organization, um, and so problematizing that can be can be helpful, because it is important to empower people so that they don't have to rely on assistance from an organization for the longterm. But, um, if that's, I don't know, but is that always possible? There's a lot there. It depends what we're talking about. It depends on the specific organization, the specific type of assistance and the specific types of families, cause there are definitely people um here in the U S. You know like, look at section eight. We have people like pretty much permanently on housing assistance and um, and I think that's okay, that can be okay, but yeah, that's a big question, I think, for all of us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's so much to unpack there in what you both shared. Thank you so much. I think I want to start by going back to one of the things you said, dr Cray, about centering communities so that they can be the ones who are driving the initiatives. They are the ones who are identifying their problems, identifying the solutions and holding the power to be able to push that forward. Why is it so hard for us to do that? I think most organizations are saying that's what they want to do. Why is it so hard?
Speaker 2:I think there are many layers to that issue. I think one issue is that, by virtue of marginalization, by virtue of being marginalized, virtue of marginalization, by virtue of being marginalized, the voices of communities are sometimes stifled or not listened to or not amplified, so that it's I think it's easy to be on the outside and have, you know, a quote, unquote expert perspective on how to define a problem and how to come up with a solution for the problem, and then how to you know, uh, apply, apply that, whatever solution that is, in what is essentially a laboratory um, which is the community. Uh, and I would really like to see that model flipped. Um, and that's that's hard to do in the systems that we have, whether it's, you know, funding systems or academia.
Speaker 2:None of the structures that currently exist support flipping that approach, because it's not easy and it requires a true relationship with people in community and as an outsider coming into a community, you can, you can develop a relationship, you can, you can develop a partnership with organizations, but there's there's always the question of are you talking to everybody in the community that that whose voices need to be amplified? Um, and that's a very difficult question to to figure out. Um, so I I think there's a lot of, I think there's a lot of different uh barriers to raising up community voices. Um, so I'll stop there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and adding off about on that and sorry, let me say that again, yeah, and jumping off on that. I think that it requires, you know, folks like us to let go of control, and I think of one of the I think one of the biggest barriers in letting go of that control is letting Let me say that again, and I think one of the ways that it's hardest for these people to let go of control is because we want to do the things that we're interested in. We want to do the things in the ways that we want to do. I hear that from funders all the time.
Speaker 3:Well, we are really interested in funding blank, we are really interested in funding this or that. And even as me, as a researcher, well, you know, I'm really interested in researching this. So if that's the project that you want me to do, I don't think I'm going to get involved, because I have to, you know, follow my research trajectory and I have to be able to explain that what I do is coherent, you know. So, being purely unattached and just being able to purely follow the community's needs is really hard. You have to be like, yeah, I'm going to fund this, no matter what you want to do that's.
Speaker 1:That's rare, I'm going to fund this, no matter what you want to do. That's rare, yeah, it's rare, and it's challenging for grantors and for organizations who have specific areas in which they are passionate about. They're interested in women's rights and gender-based violence and menstrual pads and things like that, and you're like, well, we're an organization that kind of does that or we're kind of interested in that. Can we partner with you and finding that alignment is so challenging and also really, really, really important.
Speaker 1:So I think one big piece of what's often missing is this unidirectional communication. So donors have their own kind of priorities in mind. They have their own things that they're passionate about and, like you said, sarah, like it's okay for people to have particular passions that they're interested in. As a researcher, you're like I'm really interested in this and I'm really not interested in this. I'm really interested in this and I'm really not interested in this. But how do we help people match up and align those passions with one another but also compromise and meet in the middle to make changes so that each person is able to benefit in this relationship?
Speaker 2:It's not easy to do, and as a faculty member in a university, it's even more difficult to do, given what Sarah was describing of you have to have a narrowly defined set of research interests. And then, for donors, not everybody can do everything you. You do, you have to, you have to narrow something. Um. I mean, the approach that I've taken over the past 15 or so years is, uh, more at the organizational level, uh, versus the community level, um, and so, uh like, for example, I've worked with Jesuit Refugee Service on so many different projects since probably 2010, 2011. And the way I approach that is relational, not transactional. So I've gotten to know their organization very, very well. They know our organization very well. We've placed dozens of interns with them in their international office and all over the world.
Speaker 2:And part of that relational versus transactional approach is listening and understanding the nature of the organization, what they're struggling with, what their priorities are, what their values are. And we're lucky because JRS and BC share a set of values based on Jesuit Catholic orientation. So, through that relationship, through that listening, when things come up that they need to address and they need some kind of structured approach or some kind of data collection or analysis, then we can talk about that, and sometimes that results in a project that gets funded. Sometimes it is a student project. In fact, I would say, more often than not it involves bringing in doctoral students and master students to help do something that will be a learning opportunity for the students but also advance what JRS needs to do in moving their mission forward um and I have a lot of specific examples I can talk about um, or we can, we can do that later, so but but that's kind of the.
Speaker 1:The framework that that I'm thinking of is this relation, relational framework versus a transactional framework a topic that's come up over and over again in our conversations that we've been having about empowerment over the last couple of weeks is relationship being first being tantamount to any sort of conversation that you're beginning, and I think those things take time to build, to understand one another, to understand vision and mission and expectations and to talk about expectations. I think that is probably next step with anything. So you build a relationship with an organization, then you set expectations. We expect to fund projects that are related to this. We expect to do research that's related to this. We have alignment to do these sorts of things. And then I'm borrowing this from Dr expect to do research that's related to this. We have alignment to do these sorts of things.
Speaker 1:And then I'm borrowing this from Dr Perry Janssen's white paper, which will hopefully soon be published, and he and I will be talking about that in an upcoming podcast episode, starting with the relationship, moving to expectations and then finally moving to resources. What do I bring to the table that can help in this project? What do you bring to the table that can be helpful in this project? And making sure that things are in alignment so that the power is shared equally and equally doesn't necessarily mean, you know, I have more resources than you, therefore I have more power. But correctly weighing things so that each party is able to play their role well and be in alignment. Each party is able to play their role well and be in alignment.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's really important. The expectations piece. I'll just go back to the example of JRS. So the work we've done with JRS ended up being the basis for a memorandum of understanding with the university At Boston College. It was the first MOU that the university had ever done with an external organization. Now they have lots, but this is like six years ago. Seven years ago they'd never done an MOU, and so part of that MOU was outlining the expectations not in great detail, because you have to allow flexibility, but training and education, internships, joint grant proposals, sort of what we would call consulting. So we would outline all of those and say this is the shared mission of our two organizations and then this is how we're going to operationalize that without going into detail. Operationalize that without going into detail. So you have like a shared understanding and then that guides how you think about when issues come up or challenges come up. Where does that fit in with the framework, and then how do we take that to move the work forward.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think that's an excellent model for a collaboration between two organizations. Our work with our Together for Global Health Network functions largely the same way, especially through our maternal health mission training midwives. Each organization kind of brings their own skills and expertise and individuals together and then we all kind of work together on a joint project with that joint mutual understanding. I wonder if you all have examples to share related to how that looks working with local communities or working within the community itself community to community organization.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, in our previous conversation we identified that we have a shared contact in Healy International Relief Foundation.
Speaker 2:So we've done some work with them, using a similar model of getting students to work sort of like external consultants, and we help them develop a monitoring and evaluation framework, and one of our students who is now employed by them is their research and evaluation lead.
Speaker 2:But from what I understand of Healy, they're very embedded in the community. So they work with something like 30 hospitals and clinics across I don't know how many districts in Sierra Leone, but they're working directly in the clinics and working with the doctors, the nurses, the midwives, trying to figure out what are their needs. How do they have a, you know, a steady supply of materials coming into the clinics, making sure that staff are appropriately trained, working with the Ministry of Health and Sanitation at the government level, working with University of McKinney to develop a midwifery curriculum. So that's an organization that it's a small organization but their reach is. Although it's contained in Sierra Leone, to my knowledge it's their reach within Sierra Leone is profound and the fact that we both independently know and work with them, I think, is evidence that that is the case.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they're fantastic friends and highly collaborative, and they're who come to mind when I think about organizations that collaborate well also, and with that it makes me think a little bit about. There's another organization that we're connected with called Sufficient Fish spelled out in the title and one of their mottos is you know, you should teach a man to fish instead of giving a man a fish, but you should also make sure that they have fishing holes where they can go and fish. Oh, I love that. Yeah, I know, I wish I could take credit for it. That was really good.
Speaker 3:So I wonder if you all have thoughts or things that come to mind about what organizations, groups that are coming from this top-down approach, can do to shift themselves to be organizations that provide fishing holes, I mean to be honest, the first thing that comes to mind for me is political advocacy, because usually to make fishing holes, I think that's we're talking about things that are of a pretty large scale, that probably have to happen from a government level, not something that some small foundation can create right level, not something that some small foundation can create right.
Speaker 3:A lot of the problems that we solve, I mean a lot of the problems that we're faced with, have to be solved at that big picture level. So something that I see a lot of local organizations in Chelsea do in my city is that they do focus on helping mobilize community members to not just, to you know, show up at a protest or to show up at a hearing, but to also understand how to organize, how to organize their fellow community members to achieve change and how, to you know, communicate the issues in a way that can potentially move people to make change. I haven't seen so much about what this could look like in a low and middle income context. I don't know if you've seen groups doing that in Sierra Leone or if it's even worth approaching, but I guess you do do it with your care reform work too. Maybe that's part of the answer right. You're not just doing reintegration on an individual child level, you're also I guess you're creating the fishing holes by also trying to work with the national and local governments, right?
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, our allies at the Child Reintegration Center are members of a network called the Sierra Leone Coalition for Family Care and they work very closely with other reintegration, family-based care-focused organizations to advocate not just to the Sierra Leone government but also to ambassadors in the UK, ireland, the United States and other countries about the care reform movement. We're hoping one day Sierra Leone will be joining some of the other countries in Africa that have moved away from institution-based care and made it illegal, opening the door for them to create those fishing holes where children can grow up in families.
Speaker 2:I like this. I did not set her up to ask me that question. I promise I like this concept of fishing holes. I also think about it as pathways, so that if you have a program and the program is by nature time limited that you've given some thought to the exit strategy for people that are in that program so that when they leave there is some kind of plan for them to engage and continue the progress that they made while they're in that program. I'll give yet another generous example. I have so many examples just because I've worked with them for so long.
Speaker 2:But they used to have a higher education program for refugees where they would earn. People that would participate would earn college credit. But the issue was the program would end and then refugees are still in camps. And then the big question is then what? And so JRS pivoted sort of away from higher education, which was limited to a very few number of people who would even qualify for that, to more of a vocational approach. And what they did when they were designing this program is called Pathfinders.
Speaker 2:What they did when they designed this is to go into all the communities where they were planning to start this program and do an in-depth needs assessment to identify what are the resources in the communities where people were living needs in terms of like, what are some market niches for people that you know, if you were going to learn a trade, what kind of trade would be in demand in that community. And then they sort of backwards mapped that from doing a needs assessment to building a curriculum that would build a pipeline to lead out to meet those needs in the communities. I mean, it's not perfect, it's. You know, there there's always going to be mismatches and imbalances here and there and market fluctuations and you know general deprivation, but at least it's a strategy that that is trying to equip people to be trained and to go into the community and achieve this. People talk about self-sufficiency or self-reliance and I mean that's sort of a UNHCR goal and this actually is a way of trying to move people in that direction by creating the pathway for them to achieve that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm really struck by this example in the way that it balances two kind of competing issues we talked earlier about, like like no organization can do everything, and I would say, in fact, organizations that try to do everything end up failing. They burn out, they lose all their money. They can't, you know, because they don't have expertise in everything, they don't have the resources to do everything, and it's just impossible to try and do all things no-transcript which and possibly sharing of resources.
Speaker 2:Those are very difficult things because it's then it becomes political. So it takes a lot of intention and goodwill and being centered in your values to be able to approach that type of collaboration in a transparent but productive and yet has some boundaries to it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and we'll talk more about collaboration in our next quarter podcast episodes, how nonprofits can work together and why that is just so hard for them to do. You also mentioned this idea of an exit strategy, that organizations need to again think about the big picture. How are we going to get people to this place of self-reliance? What does self-reliance look like for them? What does it look like in this context? But, Sarah, you shared earlier you used the example of people that live in Section 8, housing people that are chronically poor, chronically put in these impoverished situations that foster this cycle of poverty. What are the limitations of the empowerment model? Is this true self-reliance even possible for everyone?
Speaker 3:I don't think it is and I think that it requires reframing what we think about as self-reliance. I mean, in our society, here in the US and in a lot of other places, people look down on individuals who they see as receiving government assistance of cash benefits like welfare, tanf or SNAP, food stamps or some, maybe something like Section 8 housing, which is, which are housing vouchers that help you pay your rent. But we all benefit from government assistance. We, we get a child tax credit when we, when we have a baby, we get a child tax credit when we, when we have a baby, we get, you know, tax breaks when we buy a house, you know, for mortgages or something I don't really know how that works. We are the government, you know, helps us pave our roads and build our bridges and you know the government is prioritizing, basically subsidized driving your car, because they do all that for you.
Speaker 3:I think that we just have to be careful about stigmatizing people who use government benefits, because we all benefit from the government. But it does make sense that you want to also empower people. You want to help people maybe have an even more more stability than they would have had on government benefits, because in the U? S. You know, food stamps and snap might not be enough to live on. So how can we? Uh help someone achieve the sort of uh you know, the job skills that they need, or find a job or something that can pay them better than SNAP could pay? Yeah, I see both sides of it, but I also think we have to be careful, tom you have any thoughts to add?
Speaker 2:Well, I agree with what Sarah was saying and I also think that nobody lives in isolation. Um, what sarah was saying, and I also think that nobody lives in isolation. Uh, even even aside from from government benefits, I mean, nobody is a self-made person. You know like everybody has families, uh communities. You know natural gifts, uh education, and nobody is inventing that on their own for themselves. Um, you know of, you can put effort in. There's the thing about the work ethic. I mean, of course that's important, you have to do the application, you have to push yourself forward, but nobody is existing in a vacuum. Nobody is existing in a vacuum. So this idea of self-reliance or self-sufficiency, I think it does speak to something in our culture that values that individualistic thinking, and a lot of other cultures are not like that. It's more interdependent.
Speaker 2:And people see the value and importance of families and communities and they don't really think of individuals apart from those families and communities, individual from the family and the community and kind of belies a cultural attitude that's behind that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, your point about stripping the individual from their culture and their community of course makes me think of our child welfare work. So much of the focus of orphanages and care institutions is on this particular child. This particular child needs food, they need shelter, they need an education, they need access to health care. But it is very Western, possibly just very American, to say you pull yourself up by your bootstraps and you know this is the only person. That matters is the individual and not looking at that broader context of the community that they live in, the social systems and safety nets that exist or don't exist within that community, the governmental support that they have, the family support that they have all of those are things that play a role in how we turn out. And so, unless you're Tarzan, you know, alone in the jungle, fending for yourself for the most part, although I think Tarzan also had some social safety nets with the apes.
Speaker 2:Had a pretty good community, from what I understand.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I guess if you're alone, maybe in the 100-mile wilderness of Maine, and you built your own house very little house on the prairie style, and it's just you, then really everybody is reliant on something and we have to decide how we define what it means to be self-reliant based on that understanding. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 3:Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I think we've talked a lot about how donors study of children and caregivers' mental health who were affected by Ebola, and so it was a longitudinal. It was a mixed-methods longitudinal study of the effects of Ebola on kids and caregivers' mental health, and so part of that is we engaged with the Ebola Survivors Association of Sierra Leone and they became our lead partners who went into the community, explained the study, recruited participants and they were our main liaisons and so at the end of the study we had our preliminary results and we thought it was important to actually go back into the communities and share what we found, just as a way of honoring their participation. But also as a way of honoring their participation, but also they've invested their time and their effort and we've, you know, rather than just run off and publish in scientific journals, we wanted to kind of share what we found with the communities and get feedback, and it was an immensely successful effort. So we went to each of the six districts where we collected data. The Survivors Association convened a town hall type meeting and the two main researchers, myself and John Sheflin from Tulane University he's a medical doctor, so I explained the mental health and the kind of community effects and that he explained the more medical and and health, health science side of things. And we got a lot of good feedback, a lot of good questions, uh, and people were deeply appreciative of the fact that we came to the community and engaged with them in that conversation.
Speaker 2:But that's not why I'm telling the story. Why I'm telling the story is one of the questions was what research should we be pursuing that would be helpful to your community? And the answers that we got in almost every district, if not every district, is we need jobs, we need healthcare, we need education. They're not thinking about what kind of research is going to help their community. They want very basic, practical things. You know, which really got me thinking about how do you do that in a scientific framework?
Speaker 2:When, when, when your role as an academic is to produce science and you're in a community that is not necessarily going to directly benefit from that science, it, the knowledge base, will, but and they may indirectly benefit, um, but their needs are very, very much different and the the difficult spot that puts somebody like me in, who got into social work to be of some kind of service, to, to help in some way. Are we helping, you know, that's, that's the question, and, uh, it's something that I think about a lot. Um, and I, I, I really, uh, from those meetings I carried a lot with me back to the university and trying to think about what, what are we doing and how are we doing it? And how, how is it meeting needs? And some might argue that's not the role of academia. They would argue the role of academia is to produce knowledge and I'm personally not satisfied with that answer, but I also don't have an alternative answer.
Speaker 3:Sarah, thoughts from you. Yeah, I think that's a tough one. It's really hard to feel like you're in a spot where your organizational constraints or whatever don't solve the problems that you know the community is asking to solve. And it also can happen when you're it's not just an academia versus you know, a non-profit thing. It's also if you're, if you're the non-profit that specializes in providing menstrual project products and they're asking you for school supplies then or or something totally different.
Speaker 1:Maybe that's the best example, but yeah, it's, it's tough similar dynamic yeah yeah, yeah, and I'm struck by the the issue of how research is inherently like taking.
Speaker 1:You know you're taking information and, of course, like, you're giving it to this wider community as you're sharing, but you're not able to give to that community. And so, from the community perspective, it's you took all of this information from us and then we got nothing as a result from it, and maybe it'll trickle down and maybe it won't. But how do we align that with the fact that research is something that is desperately needed within the nonprofit sector? That often doesn't exist. You get a lot of people that are giving, like, anecdotal evidence, they're telling stories, they're, you know, sharing about specific people that are benefiting, but when it comes to really deciding, like, is this program actually working? Does it have the ability to help even more than just this community? You have to have research to be able to back that up and it has to have some amount of rigor to it to really be influential. And so it's this kind of darned if you do, darned if you don't sort of situation that you're in.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, it is an accountability issue. Ultimately, if you're working on the program side and you're not doing something that is effective but you don't know it, that's where the research and evaluation piece is key, and I think that's why I've found it easier to work at the organizational level versus the community level, because I'm able to speak directly to the program side and help them refine their programs. But that doesn't necessarily equate to aligning programs with community needs. That's a different level and I don't usually have access to that level. And when I do like in that example I gave you in Sierra Leone, it's so far mismatched from whatever networks that I have that I don't even know what to do with it. So yeah, so it's a it. So yeah, so it's a tricky balancing act, one of the things that I mean.
Speaker 2:I obviously think research is extremely important. I teach it, I do it. You know it's like my entire professional life. On the other hand, there is that extractive element that is revolting to me and and almost mimics like a mineral extraction. It's I don't know how it's really that different, other than maybe the intent behind it, but, but, and, and I just keep going. So this is my inner dialogue coming out as I struggle with these issues. This is where I go back to the relational versus transactional approach. So you know, if you're committed to working with an organization or a community, that that you're going to do your best to be there, whether there are funds available or not. You know that you're really there to to accompany and to serve and to lend your resources, sometimes freely, sometimes there's a contract, but you're you're going to be there and and help to the best of your ability, and I think that's how you get out of the extraction piece of what we're talking about, which I'm very aware of.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it makes me think about what we talked about a little bit earlier, like alignment to purpose, so aligning communities to understanding where donors and where researchers and NGOs and other people are coming from when they're asking for this. And I think we have to find ways to be able to connect them to the benefit of research if we're ever going to get them to believe in the power of research. You know, why are you coming here asking me all these questions? I think it's a pretty common sentiment of a lot of communities because they aren't able to connect to that benefit later on. Yeah, and I think that brings up a broader issue we haven't yet talked about today, which is how do we measure empowerment we talked about? You know this definition of self-reliance isn't quite in alignment with what is realistic or actual or even beneficial to all people. But what does it look like for organizations? You know we help children worldwide by strengthening and empowering families and communities. Okay, how do you prove that somebody is empowered? What does that even mean?
Speaker 2:I don't have any deep scientific thoughts about how we operationalize the concept of empowerment. I think that one approach and you could do this systematically would be to talk to people directly and A ask them what that means, what that term means, and then if we're talking in relation to a program or a service or something, then I think there is a way to engage with people who are doing that service or program to articulate the extent to which they were empowered in that process or to the extent to which they were empowered in the program, in the development of the program, the implementation of the program, and you can do that in a systematic way. I would see it more as qualitative work than quantitative, although you can use that qualitative information to inform some kind of quantitative measure. Um, I'm not aware of that work being done at this point, but maybe it is yeah, I think, I think you would have to.
Speaker 3:Well, I I'm always like the person who says, okay, let's go backwards and work backwards from this problem. So I think it depends on what, what your goal is. If you are you're, if you're an organization that's providing a service or a program and you say that your goal is to empower people through this program, then I think you start at the, at the top level, and you try and figure out what are you actually trying to do in your clients or in the folks you work with on the ground. And if the goal is, it might be very clear, it might be very obvious that the goal is that we want this family to be able to take care of their children without the child being at risk of entering an orphanage. And so then you break that down further. And what does that look like in a family? Does it mean that they're economically stable? Does it mean that the child feels loved for, loved and cared for in the family and it doesn't want to run away anymore?
Speaker 3:And then you can like create your measures around around. That you know, but I think it. But there are also um benefits to. So that that's one approach. Is you. You start from the top and you ask the designers of your program what impacts are you trying to see more specifically than just I'm trying to empower people? But yeah, it's an interesting idea to also start from the ground up and ask people what does it mean to be empowered? Is this program empowering you? And there might be some situations where that latter approach is useful as well. I'm not sure.
Speaker 2:I don't know what. Do you think those would be, tom? I don't know. I mean, because we're talking about the importance of top-down versus bottom-up, and I think, if you're designing a program and the goal is empowerment, I think, yes, you have to know what that goal is in order to you know. It's like coming up with a logic model and you know, having having your, your outcome and then all the steps you you take to get to that outcome. But I also feel like that outcome needs to be informed by the community. So, you know, how does the community define empowerment? Is that something they think is important?
Speaker 3:Um, and that's that starts. That starts, though, before the before, this issue of how do you measure it that we're going back a bunch of steps, until what program should we actually do and how should we do it?
Speaker 2:I think I see it as all related.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so um yeah, to get to the part of how do you measure it, I think there's a whole life cycle of community engagement through program design and implementation and then evaluation, that the end product of the measurement is going to have to be linked to the beginning part of the process, which is that, the actual community engagement. So scientifically, we're talking in very vague terms, like hopelessly vague terms, but there has to be something behind that. I mean, the scientific piece of the measurement is not the biggest piece, it's it's this community engagement piece somebody thought spinning through my head.
Speaker 1:I'm trying to pick one. Yeah, I think I think what you're both kind of painting a picture of is like engagement at every level. Um, because, especially if we're talking about like a large donor organization that's controlling a lot of funds, um, they don't necessarily have the ability to tailor their approach to every single different community, which is going to have unique needs and unique assets and unique problems and all of those things. But there still has to be some level of customization that's done based on a community's particular needs and desires and hopes for their own future. So I think that process of identifying what empowerment looks like at a community level and I think both of you are right basically is what I'm saying Coming from both directions. I think you can meet somewhere in the middle and find a way that benefits all and gathers the information that you need. It also makes me think about we're doing a lot of capacity building work with the CRC to do a lot of what Sarah was talking about.
Speaker 1:You know what are your goals? What do you hope to see in families, that sort of thing, and I've been really struck by the idea that nobody's really ever asked them that before. That a lot of local organizations are like we've got this donor, they fund us to do this work. It's a job that I do every day and there isn't a. There isn't space or even like thought process or time for them to think through and say what is the vision that I really have for what this family's life could look like, what is the vision that I have for what all the families that we support, where they could be, what the community could look like as a result of what we do?
Speaker 1:And so stepping back and giving them the space to say what would Sierra Leone look like? If we wanted to say what the future would look like, you know, if we're dreaming into what our future state would be, what would it look like? And then taking that step back and going, okay, how do we play a role in getting Sierra Leone to that place? But they've not gone to their own families and said you know what are you looking for to be empowered? But I think if they did, they might struggle with the same problem of no one's ever asked me what my future could look like. I've never imagined even what that future could look like.
Speaker 3:All I can think about is the future of tomorrow where my kids don't have any food. That's kind of the process that Tom and I did in Kenya when we were working with changing the way we care. We realized that there is this big problem in the research on residential care institutions and reunification and orphans and separated children is that you had too many situations where the researchers were the ones picking the measures right. And what if we're researching the wrong questions? What is it that matters to the children in their lives? So then, together with Catholic Relief Services and Maestral and Changing the Way we Care, we did a bunch of focus groups with children who had been reunified and with young adult care leavers, and we asked them what does it look like to have a good life when you've been reunified? What does it look like to have a good life when you're living in an orphanage?
Speaker 3:And we created a list of survey questions that reflected those things, and what we found is that you know a lot of these top-down Western researchers. They might have researched nutritional status and economic outcomes and school achievement, but the kids also told us that it was like to be happy. You need to have time to play, you need to be. You have to, you know, see your family as, as you have to be satisfied with how much time you spend with your family. You have to have some like freedom of movement and autonomy to to go where you want to go um. So I think that you could do the same thing, even whether you call it well-being, happiness, empowerment, stability, whatever it is, um, asking people what that looks like in their life, um is a good place to start with, measuring it.
Speaker 2:I agree this imagination piece is really important. I mean, you have to imagine a better life before you can figure out how to move in that direction, and Paul Farmer used to talk about this, about imagination too, about imagining better systems, imagining better care, imagining a context where everybody has access to health care, and so I really like that piece of the systems level and I think you could use it with individuals and families and communities to to ask them to imagine what a better life would look like too. To ask them to imagine what a better life would look like.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So back to this idea of engagement at every level organizations, healthcare systems, large donor organizations all also have to have that imagination of what that future goal looks like and then have that alignment, across from the very top to the person in the community, of what that future is supposed to look like.
Speaker 1:And I'm struck also by this idea that if your expectations are higher than your actual life, if they're greater than your actual life, then that's when, of course, you're dissatisfied with how your life is than your actual life, then that's when, of course, you're dissatisfied with how your life is. And I think, sarah, in the research that you did thinking about, like the corporal punishment research, if the expectation is that you know when children are bad, they get a spanking and that's what you expect life is like, then if you get spanked you're not going to be angry, you're not going to. You know it's not going to have this detrimental effect on your life because your expectations didn't exceed your reality. And so we have to, I wouldn't say, be cautious. But we also have to consider how changing people's expectations faster than we're able to change the system is going to affect their overall perception of how things are progressing, especially when we go into communities and say like you know how are things going. Has this increased your happiness? Has this made you feel more empowered?
Speaker 3:That's interesting.
Speaker 2:Early in my career, I worked as a social worker with families that were adopting kids out of foster care. This is in northeast Georgia and many of these families had already raised biological children and it's a fairly conservative culture and spanking, you know, was the norm and you know, spare the rod, spoil the child, kind of thing. But the state of Georgia, they were very clear that you could not use corporal punishment on kids that were in state custody. So then I had to tell families that and people didn't like it, because that's a very important tool of parenting for for a lot of families, um, so then there's that initial hurdle and they definitely did not feel empowered when I had to deliver that news. Um, and then I had to help them come up with alternative strategies for when problems did come up when the child was in the home of.
Speaker 2:You know, like behavior charts and and you know all the things that that you know that they teach you how to do in social work, school and um, in most cases it worked pretty well, um, but I think in terms, if you're, if you're looking at empowerment and expectations, uh, I think families were very frustrated that they couldn't use their top line form of discipline, and so we then had to get creative and figure out different ways of doing that and I think maybe ultimately that would be empowering, but certainly not at the beginning. I think it was very. I think families perceived it as very disempowering, but also very important for all the reasons we know about child trauma and that kind of thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm also thinking about I mean you're talking about like an actual law within the state of Georgia that this exists, and I think we've explored this a little bit.
Speaker 1:But I want to touch a little bit more on the idea that when we talk about things in like a US or Western context, we're doing this with the idea that there are social safety nets in place and that those things exist to benefit and protect its citizens of a state, a country, a county, you know whatever level you want to look at that on. But in low and middle income contexts, most of the time, these social safety nets don't exist at all. And so I think a struggle, especially for Western American organizations, is to figure out how to embed themselves in a culture where there are no social safety nets and there are no expectations of a social safety net. And I'm thinking a lot about like should I mean we talked about like political advocacy? How much of that should be done on a state level to make sure that their citizens have access to resources and the things that they need to survive and thrive, and how much of that is stuff that just needs to stay at the community level? Communities should look out for one another to support them.
Speaker 2:I don't think they're mutually exclusive. So when I worked with Catholic Relief Services, they worked directly with the local organizations that were doing school feeding but also curriculum development for kids. So the idea was to keep kids in school, um through the vehicle of, you know, providing food, uh, but then while they're at school, to to um strengthen the curriculum so that they're. So the long-term goal was that they have increased literacy and then they're going to have longer-term, better life outcomes. So they had a piece that was very the larger frame of this.
Speaker 2:It's the McGovern-Dole Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program, which has now been canceled. But what CRS did was to work with the individual communities and the local organizations that were doing the frontline provision. But then they had an advocacy piece where they were working at the government level, so working with the Ministry of Education to help the Ministry of Education support stronger curriculum and also consistent school feeding in every district of the country. So in some ways they developed a model program in one or two districts and then advocated with the government and the Ministry of Education to adopt that model and start rolling and building it into their budgets to roll that out across the country. So you can do, they were doing both.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm not sure if governments need to be supporting communities or if communities need to be scaling up ideas to the government, but somewhere in between there needs to be support bidirectionally, that way as well.
Speaker 2:Bidirectionally correct.
Speaker 1:And what you mentioned about life outcomes trying to influence the life outcomes of these children through this feeding program. That's a pretty long-term goal. I think another struggle that is being faced within the social impact community is measuring things for the long term and saying that you know, we think this is going to have a lifelong impact on people, but not having even possibly the resources to measure that and knowing that humans don't live in a vacuum and so there's lots of things that can influence their life outcomes over time. So thoughts from either view on long-term impact.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I have lots of thoughts. This is actually one of my big pet peeves is that we seem to want short-term, inexpensive solutions to have life-changing, transformative, transformative, lifelong impact on people. I think it comes out of this idea of like for only one dollar a day, you can transform a child's life forever, and I think we see it in the in research and like mental health research too. With just a and the donor communities, if you can like, make your intervention or your program seem magical and scalable and super inexpensive, then you'll you'll get the funding that that's like the thing that's the most attractive to donors. But I just wish that we would just get a little more, uh, realistic about it and just, you know, not try and not feel this pressure that funders will only fund something if it's going to be super short term and super cheap, like. No, maybe we do have to invest long term, you know.
Speaker 2:And maybe be more to your point, be more humble in what we're aiming to achieve. I worked with a program once doing an evaluation, and their long-term outcome was world peace. I'm like what?
Speaker 3:That's amazing.
Speaker 2:Very distal outcome. So you know, like there's, we can work towards world peace, but also let's figure out what the shorter term outcomes are. Yeah for sure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, which goes back to setting big dreams. What is the future state of the world that you would like to live in? And then, what is our part of that future state of the world that we will live in?
Speaker 2:Well, I mean and that's part of clarifying your values, that's part of imagining a better future. Those are all good things. That's part of imagining a better future. Those are all good things. But we also have to be realistic about what can be done in a certain time frame with limited resources, what can be documented with research or evaluation. But the vision and the imagination should be the guides, not chasing the funding or trying to do some kind of marketing campaign to get more funding. You know that's an easy trap to fall into.
Speaker 3:I think that's a really important point. You brought up things that are actually measurable within you know research methods, because I think that that's a really difficult thing, this whole idea of measuring empowerment. I think that sometimes programs can and should do things that are not real, that it's not really possible to measure. I mean, I don't know, what do you guys think about that?
Speaker 2:To me that that highlights the the limitations of research methods and how, if you're entirely driven by those methods, that you're gonna narrow your scope and your worldview, uh, in a way that crowds out vision and imagination.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, sometimes and I I think there's multiple reasons why something can be not super researchable Sometimes it's because maybe a program can work for some types of people but not others, and it's still worthwhile to do, even though you don't have a good way of figuring out who it works for and who it doesn't. I think sometimes the impacts you want to have are kind of intangible, like sometimes you can't ask in a survey question, you can't ask about the thing that you're trying to measure. You know, maybe it's a sense of community, it's a sense of self-worth, it's a sense of self-efficacy. I mean, everyone tries to make measures of these things, but I don't believe that the measures necessarily are always going to capture it. You know what I mean, yeah.
Speaker 2:Then you start moving away from empirical work to like philosophy and theology, and you know things that are bigger. So I think what you're saying, sarah, is that some things should not be empirical yeah well, you heard it here first, folks.
Speaker 1:Uh, two researchers said we no longer have to no. I think that's also what happens when you're so engrossed in the research, you become so aware of the limitations of it too yeah, you're always bumping up against the limitations, that is for sure yeah, it makes me think of like plato's allegory of the cave, like the research is the shadows on the wall, but the real world is, is really outside the cave and you're only seeing like a shadow of it almost.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that sounds right to me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's really interesting, yeah, and I think what you're talking about, sarah, is like there's this really difficult balance between there's really no good way to measure belonging, there's no good way to measure. We work with a bunch of organizations that are trying to develop like spirituality metrics, you know. I mean, if you're thinking about like an organization whose focus is evangelism, you know we're going to bring people to Christ. We not give you any money. Well, no, we, we connected with these people and we moved this forward. You know, like there's there's lots of little steps along the way that are also meaningful but are impossible to measure.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's the thing is. Sometimes it's about like planting a seed and that that seed doesn't grow till later, but it's still mattered that you did it, you know, and it it, I don't know. Yeah, but people want to like quantify it with like cost-effectiveness research and it's. You can't do a cost-effectiveness project around planting seeds of change.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, but you still have to be accountable. You have to be accountable for what you said you were going to do and what you said you hoped it would accomplish. You know, how did we achieve it? Is it possible to achieve it? Is it possible to measure that we achieved it?
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I think I was trying to dig for an example as we were talking, and I think it's like in Chelsea, you know, we have story time at the library. We have at the Family Resource Center, which is actually funded by our local child welfare services for child abuse prevention. They do weekly art groups with moms, and like you're not going to evaluate that and be like, wow, we prevented so much child abuse. Or like we got you know, we increased students, students, reading scores. But yes, it's still good to have you know and and I don't know like how you, how you quantify that empirically, but I, I don't think you have to. I think we still have to. Um, we still have to have programs that are not easily measured but we know that are inherently good.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so does the outcome matter as much as the thing that you do? You know you give somebody, you give a friend, 20 bucks to buy groceries? Does it matter that you, your friend, got groceries, or does it matter as much that you were able to help them and be there for them?
Speaker 3:Yeah, or did those 20 bucks even change their life, or did it just help them get groceries this week? It's okay if it just helped them get groceries this week and it wasn't the thing that sparked the entire turnaround of their life and they never had to ask for grocery money again sparked the entire turnaround of their life and they never had to ask for grocery money again, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So then, where do we draw the line on? Like, providing services but not fostering dependency, keeping in mind this idea of you?
Speaker 2:know, everyone is dependent on something. Nobody is completely self-reliant. Well, to me it goes back to that concept of pathways and that if you're taking on the responsibility to provide something, that you also have the responsibility to help think through again the exit strategy. So, and working collaboratively with people to figure out what that strategy is, and maybe, like to Sarah's point, sometimes maybe there isn't one, and in those cases that's okay, but if there is one that might be preferable, then that's where the responsibility falls.
Speaker 3:Yeah, there's no exit strategy. The library does not have an exit strategy. We're going to keep funding it. I hope it's not like oh, the city's got to, or these children have to learn how to pay for their own books. So why are there some things that we fund indefinitely and some things where we want people to get off of it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think the line with that is often drawn with this idea of well, you can do it for yourself. A child is inhibited by labor laws in the United States of America from working to make enough money to afford their own books. Laws in the United States of America from working to make enough money to afford their own books, yeah, but are there other structural barriers like that that impact people's ability to make enough money to feed their families? So, as usual, there's more to it than anyone would like there to be and that most people know that there is.
Speaker 3:Like I wish that every family that received case management services like could exit and be like, self-sufficient and no longer need that support from a professional, adult or whatever regularly visiting them. But there are some families that don't have a social support network because everyone in their family is suffering with the same poverty and trauma that that leads to family dysfunction as they are and like I don't know. Yeah, it's something I struggle with a lot. It's something I struggle with a lot. How do you, how do you create, how do you give someone a social network? How do you? It's, yeah, it's hard. I'm just raising a lot of questions today. I don't have any answers. I don't know which which services should be funded indefinitely and which ones people should exit from. I'm just causing problems.
Speaker 1:Well, I opened saying we'd be asking questions and not answering them, and I think we've done a pretty good job of answering a lot of them, so I think it's okay if we still have some more.
Speaker 2:Well, there's so many layers to all of this, I mean and it depends on what the problem we're talking about and the type of program that's addressed to, designed to address that problem. I mean it's, once you go into the particulars, then it gets super complicated. So that's why I think we have to, like, we have to dial it back to the what are the values, what's the vision, what's the imagination, what is what's doable? And then how can we demonstrate effectiveness?
Speaker 1:Well, I think with that, I think we've asked a lot of questions, I think we've answered a few questions which, for our religious readers, I just read a thing the other day about how I think Jesus was asked 300 questions. He answered eight of them and posed 100 more.
Speaker 2:Oh, that's great, that's great so.
Speaker 1:I think it's good to ask the questions. There is value in asking the question and trying to find the answer, and I think we will always keep searching for that answer as time goes by. But there is one last question that we ask all of our guests, which is what keeps you optimistic or hopeful about the future?
Speaker 2:For me it goes back to the values piece, but also my students, and year after year you know there's new cohorts of social work students that come in so dedicated and committed to, you know, working in the world and raising people up and working alongside people. And it's not just idealism I mean, there is an idealistic aspect of that but it's something that's rooted more deeply in just what they believe and that's energizing to me and that's something I can join them in and then help launch them in their careers and that keeps me hopeful because there's just so many good-hearted, smart people wanting to help and that's encouraging.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think my answer is probably similar in that, but I think I'm inspired and optimistic because of the community I live in and that there are so many people I know who don't speak English, who are immigrants themselves and who don't have a lot of material resources, but they're so invested in their local communities and invested in activism or participating in groups and creating community with each other, and I feel really lucky to be a part of that. And I'm lucky that my kids get to be part of it too, because I have two little kids growing up here and my daughter's one she just turned one and her babysitter is one of them and seeing how her babysitter takes her to family support groups and and play groups and um and these are things that are offered, you know, by like, for example, a family resource center and for child abuse prevention for low income families and just seeing my daughter getting to participate in that really gives me a lot of optimism us and thank you, listeners, for joining us for this episode of Optimistic Voices.
Speaker 1:It is a big messy world out there and there is no shortage of need, but we here at OV believe that with radical courage and radical collaboration together we can change the world. So thanks for joining us.
Speaker 2:Thank you.
