The Pope and the CEO > Poverty
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PovertyCure – What if we’ve been asking the wrong questions?
“Charity has its place in emergency situations.… A life that is lived on as a recipient of charity is a miserable life. I think, in our DNA, the way God made us, we are made as co-creators. God wants us to perfect and to really finish His creation. And if you’re simply a recipient of charity, you’re not doing that; you’re not fulfilling your real destiny, which is this creative capacity that God has endowed us with, we’re letting that creative capacity sit idle. I think that’s—at probably at the deepest level that I can reach—what’s so inadequate about the traditional response to poverty.” Damian von Stauffenberg
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Leveling the Plowing Fields
Andreas put up a blog about the book Enough: Why The World’s Poorest Starve In An Age of Plenty a few months ago. The book, by Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman, addresses the issues underlying the food shortages that we often hear about in the news. Most recently, the United Nations declared regions in Somalia to be in a state of famine. There are countless reasons listed by Thurow and Kilman in their book, from slow adoption and funding for hybrid seeds, to agricultural subsidies given by governments of developed countries, and from underdeveloped infrastructure for bringing crops to market to a lack of crop insurance in developing countries. Unstable political situations have also contributed to the problems. Thurow and Kilman give several recommendations at the end of their book. One is, I think, aptly titled “Leveling the plowing fields.” While the authors use this to call for an end to farm subsidies in developed countries, I think it’s a useful metaphor for the whole of what the book is calling for – including the developing countries in networks of productivity, something Blessed John Paul II always called for. This means not just removing subsidies, but improving markets, and letting… Read more
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Are Simple Ideas the Best Ones?
I think sometimes they are! Check out this really cool video about how places that do not yet have electricity are using a simple solution of water and bleach to illuminate their homes and work places. Some ideas for common problems in developing countries are as simple as could be and just need to be communicated in order to catch on. An extremely simple method for disinfecting water is using solar rays – it’s called SODIS. Filling a plastic PET bottle with water and leaving it in direct sunlight for several hours will remove most pathogens and bacteria that cause the deaths of millions of people each year from water-borne diseases.
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2011 Acton University
Last week, I had the opportunity to attend an annual workshop organized by the the Acton Institute. This is the same group that is developing the Poverty Cure campaign which you now see promoted on the right hand side of this blog. The workshop was Acton University, and I had the opportunity to attend 11 intensive sessions on different topics relating to freedom, enterprise, religion, and politics. In fact, Acton has begun to post podcasts of the lectures that are available for purchase. It was a fantastic conference, very informative and worthwhile. Over the next few days, I will be posting a few different reflections on some of the sessions that I attended. In the meantime, check out the Acton Institute and PovertyCure sites!
