The world experiences its share of problems—hunger, joblessness, crime, environmental hazards—and you want to help. Yet be advised: it helps to get focused before jumping in with both feet. What problem needs to be solved? It makes sense to start locally in your community, the place where you live, work, or play. It also helps to be specific. Something needs to change! But wait. What should you do? Determining the problem to be solved becomes an essential first step.
It can be easy to get off track at the start of a project. Imagine Sophie, the new chair of First Church’s mission and outreach committee, who wonders aloud what projects the group should tackle first. She decides to poll the other members for guidance. Andy, who loves gardening and has expertise at it, says, “Let’s start a community garden!” Lucy, who has a talent for sewing, loves to shop secondhand, and has noticed new shops springing up around town, suggests starting a thrift shop. Someone else suggests raising money to give to local nonprofit agencies that benefit the poor and so forth. While none of these ideas are necessarily off track, the group has started at the wrong place. They should identify the problem at the outset instead of deciding what to do based on the resources on hand. First identify the problem to be solved. What in the community needs to change? Then ask, Are we the right people to do it? Do we have the resources?
Exclusive focus on resources can sidetrack a project, but so can focusing too heavily on people’s immediate needs. While these needs certainly are important, other issues may be the cause of the real problems that need to be addressed! People may be hungry, yet the problem is not their hunger but something else, such as lack of jobs, transportation, or proper training. Along similar lines, try thinking in terms of “solving” rather than “helping,” which is more appropriate to children. Sandra Swan, retired president of Episcopal Relief and Development, writes, “The helping that we decry is the helping that is an activity that masquerades as a solution to the problem. If we avoid using the term help, we will avoid falling into the trap of thinking that we have actually changed the system instead of merely smoothing over the symptom.” This could be compared to a doctor treating the symptom without diagnosing the underlying cause.
Staying focused on the problem can be challenging when so many demands clamor for attention. The Reverend Rodney Hunter, pastor of Wesley Memorial United Methodist Church in Richmond, Virginia, felt “constantly bombarded” by requests for emergency assistance and frustrated that providing cash assistance through the church’s “mission fund” proved grossly inadequate. This small, predominantly African American church with 130 members sits squarely in the middle of a financially struggling neighborhood. “Our church is located in a community where there are many needs. We have three housing projects in our area. And, of course, with that, you have a lot of unemployment and low-wage earners. So, there are always needs. People always need utilities, rent, food, school clothing, and things of that nature.”
Yet the emergency requests for aid masked a deeper problem: the ready availability of predatory loans. Due to lax state laws regulating the financial industry, storefront payday loan operations with names like Quick Cash and Cash Express had sprung up like mushrooms. Though promising relief from crushing debt, these loans were structured to trap unwary borrowers into paying annual interest rates as high as 300 or 400 percent. “Predatory lending is a problem,” Hunter says, “because people go into it thinking it’s not going to be difficult. It’s usually a very small loan, but by the time you take out a two hundred–dollar loan and pay about a thousand dollars back, that’s a problem.”
The real problem was predatory loans, yet solving the problem required changing state laws, which would take too long and would not alleviate the immediate pain being created by massive debt. For this reason, Hunter, together with the Reverend Charles Swadley, approached the Virginia United Methodist Credit Union to develop the Jubilee Assistance Fund, which provides small-dollar loans (five hundred to a thousand dollars) at a reasonable and fair rate of interest to church members who are burdened by debt. The credit union provides the loan, while the church provides a small sum for collateral and promises to work with the church member, in one-on-one counseling, to develop a strategy to pay the loan back. “We still provide food or clothing when necessary. But we’re concerned that it creates dependency. We want to help people help themselves.” By focusing on the problem to be solved, Hunter was able to get off the treadmill of activities related to providing cash assistance wherever it seemed necessary.
After determining the problem, capture it in a statement of purpose that encompasses the particulars of your situation. Some leaders come up with a mission statement for their team, but it can work for a program as well. The statement should say just enough without being overly comprehensive. A single-sentence statement may be too general to be useful. “Our mission is to educate the illiterate” may be accurate but too vague to be helpful. In crafting a statement, the goal you arrive at needs to relate to the local community, and it needs to be limited enough that you can accomplish it. St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Alexandria, Virginia, wrote a mission statement that provides enough detail without being overly detailed: “The group probably most resistant to any social ministries is the group we want to target—parents with battered children. They have difficulty in parenting and lack identification of their needs. And they distrust help.” Developing a statement of purpose may seem like a waste of time, but it helps you avoid the dangers of “mission creep,” an evocative term to describe how the objective of the project can become broadened and change in ways never anticipated.
The problem-solving approach to community engagement has its critics. For instance, an approach called asset-based community development prefers to start with the resources that a community needs rather than the problems that must be solved (see the “Develop Long-Term Partnerships” chapter). Both the needs-based and the problem-based approach have their merits. If you choose to begin with the problem, start by capturing it in a statement that encompasses the particulars of your situation. Be realistic about what you plan to do. These steps may keep your team on track early in the process. Otherwise, you may end up on a treadmill of activities without a clear goal.
For Reflection and Action
Here is a very simple three-step process to try:
- Brainstorm issues and problems in your local community or neighborhood.
- Determine which of the issues you wish to address.
- Create a statement of purpose that defines the issue and what you hope to do about it.
