Compassion isn’t about helping ourselves. On putting compassion to work in ways that fail to help others:
Africa can serve as a large-scale example of the problem. In the last fifty years, the continent has received $1 trillion in benevolent aid. How effective has this aid been? Country by country, Africans are far worse off today than they were a half century ago. Overall per-capita income is lower today than in the 1970s. Over half of Africa’s 700 million population lives on less than $1 a day. Life expectancy has stagnated, and adult literacy has plummeted below pre-1980 levels. “It’s a curse,” says Dambisa Moyo, and African economist and the author of Death Aid. Aid, though intended to promote heath, becomes “the disease of which it pretends to be the cure.”
A similar devastation has been inflicted upon the subsidized poor of our own country (though admittedly not as extreme). For all our efforts to eliminate poverty—our entitlements, our programs, our charities—we have succeeded only in creating a permanent underclass, dismantling their family structures, and eroding their ethic of work. And our poor continue to become poorer.
In over forty years working with the urban poor in inner-city Atlanta and around the globe, I have learned that it takes more than high ideals to bring about substantive change in populations of need. [We need to work] diligently to sort out, by trial and error, which efforts result in actual transformation and which efforts have results that are ultimately noxious and harmful.
[Toxic Charity: How Churches and Charities Hurt Those They Help (And How to Reverse It), Robert D. Lupton (HarperOne; 2011: New York NY), Chapter One: The Scandal, Pages 2-3.]
Again, give time and volunteer. Build a relationship with those who receive.
Building Capacity Connotes An Ongoing Relationship
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