This is the third blog on Poverty. We have looked at what is Poverty and what groups are ofter found in poverty. Then we looked at ways that facilitate transformed individuals. Now Some of You Want to Ask Does This Happen? The answer is a resounding yes if we build on the assets of people…
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Ways to Help Heople and Neighborhoods Out of Poverty
In my last blog I discussed poverty and the five groups who are in poverty. Also awhile back in this blog I wrote about focusing on assets, not needs. This shift of focus is central to helping people and neighborhoods out of poverty. The objective is to transform neighborhoods from the inside by building on…
Poverty
What is Poverty, Who are Rich and Who are Poor Justin Long in his blog recently shared “Words are things that we use: sometimes carefully, sometimes carelessly. I have been scanning a lot of articles lately and thinking about resilient communities. Rich or poor are difficult terms: they can be relevant or absolutes.” When we…
Organic Movement
Earlier this year I read the book Organic Community by Joseph R. Myers which compares the way a community can grow either by a master plan or organically. Master planning is what is done by most western organizations where it is top down every detailed planned out. While organic growth takes on a life of…
What is My Passion?
I want to share with you my passion, what has driven me for the last 30 years. It is the cause of: Lifting communities out of cycles of poverty and disease and facilitating people to faith and maturity in Christ. The Biblical Basis for my cause? Participate in God’s mission to restore all creation to…
What Neighborhood Transformation is All about
Some people have asked me “Exactly what is Neighborhood all about” so I wrote this to share with people. When a church in a new city asks for an Envisioning Seminar, we ask them to bring people from multiple churches together for this five hour training. From the seminar, we hope to find three to…
Organic Community, Great Book
John Myers wrote a book Organic Community comparing a community that is designed and encouraged by organic growth versus a community that is designed by a master plan. As the title implies an Organic Community is what Myers heavily favors. There are nine elements he uses to describe the difference between organic and master planned…
Identifying Assets
As follow-on to a Blog I wrote a couple weeks ago on Assets we want to follow on with how to identify assets in a neighborhood. Communities can no longer be thought of as complex masses of needs and problems, but rather diverse and potent webs of gifts and assets. Each community has a unique…
Wholistic Ministry
Let’s talk about wholistic and what it means to us in the Global CHE Network and in Neighborhood Transformation. We spell wholistic with a ‘W’ because it keeps ever in front of us the idea that we need to deal with the whole person, all aspects of their life, and the whole community or neighborhood,…
Focusing on What is There, Instead of On What is Not There
I am going to talk about one of the most critical things for working in a city that is identifying and using assets. In the last Blog we compared relief, betterment and empowerment. In this Blog we will talk briefly how do you identify where to begin. In Neighborhood Transformation we focus on the assets…