If you want to help Africa, should you...

... treat Africans like children or pets? (via The Common Room)

... or help them help themselves?

I vote for the latter.

YoungLives program for teen moms

Just in case you're looking for help...

In Young Life, we have the privilege of extending Jesus Christ’s love to kids as they are, where they are. For high school and middle school girls who are expecting or are raising a child on their own, that love takes the form of a program called YoungLives.

Treating each mom and her child or children with unconditional love and respect, YoungLives offers teen moms relief from the isolation and struggle of their daily lives and hope for the future. YoungLives mentors provide friendship, parenting advice and help meeting the practical demands of raising a child. At YoungLives club and camp, moms get to socialize and have fun while their babies get the best possible care.

More information here

Young Life is just one of many places for teens to turn, regardless of what's up (or down) in their lives. I don't know about where you live, but around here there are a number of churches that do a great job of accepting and helping people of all ages regardless of their past, or their present circumstances. Keep looking until you find them. They want to help you.

Update: I should mention that you don't have to be Christian to get help from Young Life, or from most other Christian groups that I know about.

Save lives, perhaps win prizes

Danielle Bean is spearheading an online fundraiser for a maternity home "that welcomes women in crisis pregnancies (regardless of faith), provides them with a safe, secure environment in which to live, and gives them access to the medical, educational, and professional services they need to choose life for their babies..."

And she's going out of her way to make donating fun as well as charitable. (There are reasons her blog is so popular, folks.)

Be sure and check her main page to pick up any updates.

Book note: Compassion, Justice and the Christian Life by Robert Lupton

I haven't seen the book yet, but if this interview of the author by Marvin Olasky ("City Smarts," World Magazine, June 9, 2007) is any indication, Lupton's a man well worth listening to. He's learned the hard way what types of charity tend to make things worse, just for starters.

Lupton has spent more than 35 years working with inner city poor in Atlanta.

I highly recommend the article.

What I can't get over is how closely Lupton's experiences seem to parallel the experiences of Edgar James Helms, the founder of Goodwill Industries, and, to a lesser extent, Donald L. Carcieri, who went from serving as program director for Catholic Relief Services in Jamaica to being the governor of Rhode Island.

hat tip: Zoe Sandvig

Overcoming crime, fatherlessness, and a hurricane's destruction (for starters)

Jamie Dean, writing at World Magazine, reports on Desire Street Academy, which is turning a crime-ridden area around, one young man at a time. And it's doing this despite having been leveled by Hurricane Katrina.

hat tip: Catherine Claire

Living in Community

Catez Stevens of Allthings2all is hosting a Living in Community series that's prompting some thoughtful posts around Bloggityville. The lead-in post is here.

hat tip: Shannon

Kindness Happens blog

Here you go. A Kindness Happens blog. :)

Fires, wars, murders, drugs. Too often, we read in newspapers and see all over the TV and Internet the bad things going on in the world.

But what really makes the world go round is kindness, those little acts that often go unnoticed by all but those involved. Because these small acts don't get published and publicized, people often don't believe they actually happen. So it's time to share! This blog is for posting those small acts of kindness that you do for others, or that others do for you. Hopefully, in having this group effort, people will be able to read about a number of kind acts happening daily and will feel better about life, and then hopefully, in turn, go on to carry out kind acts of their own...

Hear! Hear!

Teach a man to fish...

From Wellspring House Gives Homeless Hope, Many Families Have Homes Because Of What They Learned At A Unique Shelter - CBS News:

Schwoyer runs Wellspring — easily America's nicest homeless shelter. Families who stay there are considered guests. They eat the same food at the same time and table as the staff. And they can stay as long as they need to.

Schwoyer says she does it "because it's the human thing to do."

So how does she get people to leave? Not a problem. "Oh, as beautiful as this is, it's not their own home," she says.

Wellspring started in 1981 when Schwoyer and a group of friends from church decided to buy a house, live in it together and share it with homeless families. "And support them in whatever they needed to get on their feet," Schwoyer adds.

Since then, through donations and grants, Wellspring has expanded its building and its scope. It now offers everything from classes on finding jobs to the clothes for landing them. Perhaps because Wellspring is so comprehensive, its success rate is phenomenal: 80 percent of people who come to the homeless shelter are never homeless again.

Saying "never" about people who are still alive is always stretching your luck, but still, that's one amazing success-rate-so-far, isn't it?

hat tip: Miss O'Hara (last part of post)

Semi-related: The Samaritan Awards spotlight programs that provide effective compassion.

The National Catholic Register : From Business to Church Work to Public Service

Some politicians do get it. In this interview by Wayne Forrest, Gov. Donald L. Carcieri of Rhode Island talks about, among other things, serving as program director for Catholic Relief Services in Jamaica:

I learned a huge lesson from Jamaica's Archbishop Samuel Carter, who said to me, "I don't want you to give my people anything."

He said, "I want them to feel as though they earned it. When you give, the giver is always in the position of superiority; the receiver is always in the position of inferiority. When you give to someone who doesn't feel as though they have earned it, you diminish them as a person in their self worth."

It knocked me off the chair, because I never really thought of it that way. As I thought about it later, he is absolutely right. The notion that somehow, in my giving something good I would be diminishing the self worth of that person, stuck with me.

This reminds me of a biography of "The Goodwill Man": Edgar James Helms, by Beatrice Plumb. Or rather it reminds me of the one story in the book I can't get out of my mind.

Helms was a minister in Boston. When poor people hit hard by an economic downturn came to him begging for help, he went to the rich people of Boston and asked for money. The rich gave. He used the money to buy clothes and food and pay rent for the most needy - but it was soon gone. He went back to the rich people. But now the depression had hit them, too, and they didn't feel they had money to spare. So he went off and thought and prayed, and it came to him that the rich might not have ready cash, but they could perhaps give him their cast-off clothing. Back he went. The people of Back Bay and Beacon Hill gave and gave; he filled bag after bag. As the story goes, when the streetcar conductor said enough was enough because of the space taken up by the bulging bags, Helms manned a wheelbarrow and collected used clothes that way.

When he thought he had enough clothes to take care of the worst needs at least, he scattered the clothes on the pews, and put a sign on the door inviting people to show up the next morning to help themselves. They showed up in great numbers. When he let them in, they went crazy: stampeding, shoving, snarling, grabbing and fighting even for clothes they couldn't use.

The minister elbowed his way through the mob, got to his pulpit, and proceeded to pound his fist and yell at them, saying that they could not act this way in the House of God. Go away, he said. I will find another way to get the clothes to you, he said. He finally got them kicked out, and then he sat down and grieved. He had meant to help, but he had somehow turned formerly respectable people into thugs, even animals. At some point, he concluded that it was his fault - that to give something they need to people is to rob them of their self-respect.

The next day, he turned a small office room into a store where he sold clothes cheaply, twice a week. And then he decided to find a way to provide jobs and wages. And that's how Goodwill Industries was born. It's what Helms called "Not Charity But a Chance".

"The Goodwill Man": Edgar James Helms, by Beatrice Plumb, T.S. Denison & Company, Inc., Minneapolis, MN, c. 1965, 232pp, illustrated with b/w photos, is out of print, but as of post time it was easy to find good used copies at online stores, including some for $5 or less.