Robert Lupton, author of the book, Toxic Charity, will make a two day appearance in Richland County on October 26 and 27. Lupton’s talks will center on his idea of transformative charity, which is a model Catholic Charities and other local social service agencies are attempting to emulate in their own unique ways.
“We are using the Toxic Charity model but this is really our ‘Do something 2014’ project,” said Catholic Charities Site Manager Rebecca Owens at a follow up meeting in April.
Catholic Charities will celebrate 100 years of service to the Richland County community in October, Owens said.
“I really wanted him to be able to hit multiple audiences while he is here,” she said. “Sunday (October 26) he will be at St. Pete’s…and it will be more geared toward the faith based churches and youth groups. Monday, he is available to present to professionals…and Monday evening he will be our keynote speaker during our fundraiser and 100th anniversary.”
The group, which was comprised of representatives from about six local social service agencies, talked about several ideas of how to engage the community in not only Lupton’s talks but in trying to understand poverty.
Jennifer Jennette, programs coordinator at Community Action Commission – Richland County, talked about how her agency would be willing to offer a poverty simulation and a screening of the movie, American Winter, to add to the community events of the ‘Do Something 2014’ campaign. American Winter is an hour long movie which demonstrates what poverty looks like for homeless people, Jennette said.
“Tying it in to what we’re doing here just made sense to me,” she said.
Jennette said the poverty simulation participants would ideally be business people, politicians and people who may need not have first or second hand knowledge about the daily lives of people in poverty.
“What it does is create a community,” she said. Jobs and families are recreated along with children, bills and schools, etc. to mock the different scenarios of how a family in poverty deals with life.
“It does give a good example of the challenges of someone in poverty, what kind of obstacles they have and it’s not easy,” Jennette said. “It’s not just they’re just sitting at home all day watching TV, you’re out there trying to figure out how to make all this work.”
Another avenue of possible community engagement is the Bridges out of Poverty training, Owens said.
“(The training) really gives you a good understanding of poverty and the mindset of poverty and that our mindsets are different and instead of us professionals putting our values on the client, we need to meet them where they’re at in order to really help them through their situations,” she said. “It also talks about the difference of being poor and being in poverty. It talks about the differences in class.”
Sue Warren, case manager at Catholic Charities said she has been through the Bridges out of Poverty Training and would gladly sit through it again.
“We have a lot of people in the business sector and a lot of people that give us money – the donors – that really don’t understand poverty,” Warren said.
“The American Winter movie does that too and the discussion with that video is to target our donors and businesses to really understand what they’re giving to and why,” Jennette said.
Owens mentioned that, because of the book, Catholic Charities has revisited their ‘adopt a family’ for Christmas program, called Project Bethlehem.
“We attempted to do something a little different with that this past Christmas, and it didn’t quite work the way we wanted it to however, it did help to kind of start to shift the mindset” she said.
For the upcoming Christmas, Owens said, they are going to require their clients to do some form of community service for a total of six hours between the months of April and the end of July. In the book, Owens said, Lupton talks about a person being engaged or being a part of the things that go in their world.
“It kind of puts the responsibility back on them,” she said. “So that’s one thing that we’re doing that’s part of this.”
“The Oath for Compassion” by Robert Lupton
- Never do for the poor what they have (or could have) the capacity to do for themselves.
- Limit one-way giving to emergency situations.
- Strive to empower the poor through employment, lending and investing, using grants sparingly to reinforce achievements.
- Subordinate self-interests to the needs of those being served.
- Listen closely to those you seek to help, especially to what is not being said- unspoken feelings may contain essential clues to effective service.
- – Above all, do not harm.
