Showing posts with label community development. Show all posts
Showing posts with label community development. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Creating Our Way To A 'Be Fruitful & Multiply' Economy.

How strong is your desire to inspire real answers in your community?

Solutions start with problems, it is so basic we miss it. Scaled up, economic hard times are opportunities for a leap forward by societies willing to cultivate true creativity. We are endowed with a very powerful, universal drive to create fruitfulness. That sentence reveals the how: Create.

I am convinced that the failure of so many of the economic solutions coming out of Washington today is not so much that they are big-government solutions rather than local or that they are 'progressive' solutions rather than conservative. To me, the strategic failure of these solutions are that they do not inspire meaningful creativity and imagination.

I have long been fascinated by demonstrations of creative fruitfulness generated from simple seed investments such as Micro-lending, Community loan funds, Pay-it-Forward school projects, and Tenfold Challenges. I wonder how much of the way out of our current difficulties would be found in local communities helping locate the creative impulse in all of us while we inspire each other to 'create' our own way out of economic paralysis.

Adopting just one idea from the vast creative arsenal available to us: What if we challenged young people with small seed investments to create Tenfold returns? The scenario goes like this: A challenge is made, sometimes by a church or school, to take a seed cash amount and double or triple it or create a tenfold return. That return is usually earmarked to fund some community project, but could just as easily fund that young person to expand a business idea or fund their continued education. A portion could also go to fund two other youth entrepreneurs, and so goes the multiplication. In practice, some (but not all) take the challenge, and those that do almost always meet their goal and create the multiplying effect, but also discover great things about themselves in the process.

Think about it from your perspective (or for the young people in your family or community)... if someone were to make an offer of giving you $10 and challenging you to turn it into $100 in 30 days, could you do it and would you accept the challenge?

Would you accept a $100 to $1,000 challenge in 90 days?
Or, a $1,000 to $10,000 challenge in 6 months?
How about $10,000 to $100,000 in a year?

How many new businesses could be started in your own community? How many lives would be changed? Could your community become a model for others? What stories could your church create?

These thoughts are challenging, but then again we are already living in challenging times. Maybe a little community conversation and imaginative thinking would be well worth it... and maybe, just maybe it might be the beginning of our own economic stimulus, and a recovery of much more than we first imagined.

Monday, March 15, 2010

Redeeming Dreams From Brothels

I recently read on a mission blog, a quote of Ralph Winter: “You can’t make “a business” out of rescuing child prostitutes in Thailand, or by setting up medical clinics in the midst of extreme poverty around the world.”

...I wonder. Recently, I watched the movie, Born Into Brothels, in which a development worker, who worked with prostitutes in the red-light district of Calcutta, was drawn to reach out to their children. She was also a photographer and she had the idea of giving each of the kids inexpensive cameras and asking them to interpret their world through that medium. It worked wonders not only in creating deep relationships but the end of the story was this: she got many of them into higher education and out of the brothels by showcasing their photography... and assisting them in selling prints of their own work…which completely funded their empowerment. You've no doubt heard other stories of similar kinds of highly-creative approaches.

I wonder what is possible if we reimagined problems with a little more spirit-led creativity. Entrepreneurs focus on hidden value opportunities. As spiritual entrepreneurs, those value opportunities are the God-given treasures of identity, dreams, and purpose contained within. Our part of this empowerment opportunity might be to provide the marketing and distribution channels for those “products” of our Father’s dreams. Could this self-fund community development and mercy missions?

Rent the documentary. Check out their website: kids-with-cameras ... Get inspired. ... Watch this clip...

Thursday, August 02, 2007

Being Incarnational. (great podcast)

Great podcast to listen to while you work, drive... "Every once in a while you sit with someone and know you’ve touched something alive in the kingdom. That happened in May as I sat with Pete Atkins to record the audio interview for this month’s Journal." ---Alan Roxburgh

Podcast and Full article