BYU NewsNet - LDS humanitarian efforts on the rise

By JULIE ESPINOSA

Approximately 2.7 million people in the world live on less than $2 dollars a day, and many Latter-day Saints are trying to do something about it. A growing body of church members are starting or participating in independent humanitarian groups and contributing to causes they feel drawn to largely because of their religious background,.

Members are engaging in global service and development with groups like Globus Relief, HELP-International, Unitus, Empowering Nations, the Ouelessebougou-Utah Alliance, CHOICE Humanitarian, Engage Now, Enterprise Mentors, Deseret International and Rescue a Million.

Some 200 Mormon-related organizations stand alongside leading groups like Accion International, Grameen Bank and FINCA International and the thousands of smaller foundations dedicated to fighting poverty.

Many organizations offer small loans to their "clients," something they use to start up a small businesses to be able to take care of their families. "Small Fortunes," an award-winning, BYU-produced documentary about these microloans, will air on PBS Thursday, June 8 at 10 p.m. ET.

On both the Wasatch front and worldwide, LDS members are waking up to the problem of poverty and applying doctrinally based principles of provident living. Some are motivated by the experience of serving an ecclesiastical mission abroad. Others feel they must consider service to one's neighbor in a broader sense.

Rather than being worried about unofficial humanitarian acts, President Gordon B. Hinckley advocates proactive service in the growing global church.

"I think there is a tendency among us to say, 'Oh, the church will take care of that. I pay my fast offering,'" President Hinckley once said. "'Let the church take care of that.' We need as individuals, I think, to reach down and extend a helping hand without notice ... to give of that with which the Lord has so generously blessed us."

At an awards ceremony for the LDS-started organization Enterprise Mentors International, President Hinckley called poverty the "greatest pandemic of the world" today.

"What a poor and miserable world this would be if it were not for the great kindness of people who reach out in love to those less fortunate," he said.

Patti Liston, the orphan coordinator for Reach the Children, compared humanitarian work to the Dr. Seuss story "Horton Hears a Who" about an elephant who hears voices calling from a speck of dust and discovers an entire miniature city full of creatures living there.

"We are those who hear the voices that others cannot hear," Liston said. "And we become their voice - as we speak their names, as we tell their stories, as we share our experiences. Those who have a desire to work and to serve will gravitate to what it is we have to say."

The global microfinance movement runs parallel to the church's emphasis on cultivating self-reliance. Both operate on the principle that economic development is achieved, not through handouts, but through training and enabling people to support themselves.

One adoption of microfinance by the church is the Perpetual Education Fund, established in 2000 to provide educational loans to returned missionaries from countries with high unemployment and low educational opportunities.

"Our idea of charity [...] is to relieve present wants and then to put the poor in a way to help themselves so that in turn they may help others," President Joseph F. Smith wrote to members in the Improvement Era. "We depend on mutual helpfulness."

Several talks about self-reliance by General Authorities are available on BYU's Center for Economic Self-Reliance site at marriottschool.byu.edu/selfreliance/. The Center, established in 2002, does research to support economic development and humanitarian organizations. It is not funded by the church, but relies on donations.

The increasing involvement of the saints in recent years is encouraging to Warner Woodworth, a consultant to many NGOs and a professor of organizational behavior at BYU.

"Often I call my students 'Millennials,'" Woodworth said. "We are here at this campus for a reason. We have a moral responsibility and an ethical opportunity to develop skills and tools and methods build a better world, to prepare to live a millennial life."

Woodworth said he subscribes to the idea preached by President Wilford Woodruff, that, "We can't build up Zion sitting on a hemlock slab singing ourselves away to everlasting bliss."

Woodworth, together with LDS attorney James Lucas, authored "Working Toward Zion: Principles of the United Order for the Modern World." Members in Peru used it as a handbook in creating Eagle-Condor Humanitarian, which lifts temple-worthy Saints from poverty by teaching job skills and strengthening communities.

In his classes, Woodworth encourages students to put into practice what they are learning. Over the years, Woodworth and his students have started some 40 projects that have evolved into something beyond the class. The largest 16 provided the poor with at least half a million microloans in 2005 alone.

Last year, about a hundred LDS college and high school students from coast to coast traveled to Thailand during the summer to assist in post-tsunami reconstruction with a project conceived in Woodworth's class called alternately "Wave of Hope" and the "Joseph Smith Tsunami Rescue Brigade."

This summer, new students will establish a literary program in Ghana, teach villagers in Mozambique and start up a microcredit organization in Panama, as part of Empowering Nations, the same organization in charge of the tsunami project.

"I feel like those prophecies of last days are being fulfilled," Woodworth said. "'Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.' I'm the old man, for sure."

Not all of Woodworth's students commit themselves right from the start; some experience what he calls "the humanitarian lag time." In some cases, they are taking time to serve or volunteer or consult; in other cases they are quitting their jobs and changing their life's direction to teach the poor.

"They're feeling a call and it's not coming through the formal ecclesiastical structures, but it has a spiritual basis," Woodworth said.

www.microfinancegateway.org/

www.kbyutv.org/smallfortunes/resources/

http://marriottschool.byu.edu/selfreliance/.