True Charity
- What’s the Best Way to Help a Panhandler?
- Four High-Impact Ways Your Church Can Serve the Poor
- How to Change Things When Change is Hard: A Bird’s Eye View on the Book Switch by Chip and Dan Heath
- The Key to Effective Charity: Image is Everything
- Beyond the Welfare State: How Civil Society Can Succeed Where Welfare Has Failed.
- Redemptive Charity Requires More of Us
- Food Aid Should Be Linked to a Willingness to Work
- A Review of In the Shadow of Plenty: Biblical Principles for Caring for the Poor by George Grant
- Collaboration Is Overrated: Why Charities Working Together Is Not the First Step
- What It Means to Flourish like a ‘Watered Garden’
Subsidizing Isolation: Unintended Consequences of the FCC’s ‘Lifeline’ Program
Volunteering provides ample opportunities to meaningfully connect with people, a truth I was reminded of while serving with Watered Gardens’ overnight shelter as I listened to a man share about his romantic relationship. Though he confidently shared about the relationship’s quality, I noticed some red flags, so I attempted “truth in love” — I asked him how he knew their relationship was as healthy as he said. Immediately, his eyes glazed over and, wordlessly, he pulled his phone out of his pocket and began scrolling absentmindedly.
Where Did All the Poor People Go?
“We normally see 30 to 40 clients a day,” said the manager of a Joplin, Missouri food pantry. “Since the pandemic, we’ve seen a sharp decrease in number of clients, sometimes as few as four a day.” This is not what I expected to hear when I visited this food pantry to learn about their programs. But their experience is not an anomaly.
Why Should Government Mandate What We Can Do Ourselves?
James Whitford Executive Director Versions of this article were also published by The Federalist and The Joplin Globe. Face masks are “all we’ve got right now to fight […]
How the CARES Act Could Be “Helping” That Hurts
By Savannah Aleckson, published in the Joplin Globe on May 3rd, 2020 It’s been a historic year already, and we’re not even halfway through 2020. From the onset of the COVID-19 […]
James Whitford: Could government welfare be undermining compassion?
I love our fight for civil society. It’s not just Joplin. Communities throughout the Midwest fight to retain hospitality and restore neighborliness while volunteers care for their community members struggling […]
Why Private funding?
by James Whitford Our Founding Fathers said so. The debate as to whether helping those in need should be a matter of public or private funding is not new. Few […]