Strategic compassion acts at the point of vulnerability, not just need.

On 31 December 2019, a cluster of pneumonia cases of unknown origin was reported in Wuhan, in the Hubei Province of China. On 9 January 2020, China CDC reported a novel coronavirus as the causative agent of this outbreak: coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). With around a billion international travelers circling the globe each year, the virus proliferated, rapidly spreading across borders, causing widespread mortality and grinding the 86 trillion dollar world economy to a halt.

As of October, 2020, over 200,000 Americans have now died. Americans filing for unemployment has surpassed 40 million, or 1 in 5 American workers. Economists are fearful that half of those postings — a full 20 million jobs — will never return.Typically as a widespread crisis mounts, the compassionate arm of churches stand tall and mobilize their resources to help, executing three actions:

1. Taking up an offering to help people.
2. Telling people that if they need help, they should contact the church.
3. Distributing the offering to those who have asked.

In my experience, there is major issue that this plan fails to resolve: it only responds to need, not vulnerability.

Let me explain.

A vulnerable person is someone who is already largely supporting themselves and their family. However, the advent of a major shock — one missed paycheck or an unexpected large bill — could trigger a series of catastrophic events and place them in dire straits. But as of now, they are self-sufficient.

In contrast, a person in need cannot support themselves. Because of repeated shocks, prolonged unemployment, or severe victimization, this group of people already consistently rely on either governmental support or the charitable goodness of others to meet the needs of each day. It is a self-reinforcing position of poverty where escape is all but impossible and will likely require significant intervention from an external party.

In contrast, a person in need cannot support themselves. Because of repeated shocks, prolonged unemployment, or severe victimization, this group of people already consistently rely on either governmental support or the charitable goodness of others to meet the needs of each day. It is a self-reinforcing position of poverty where escape is all but impossible and will likely require significant intervention from an external party.

When we take a laissez-faire approach, telling people to be in touch if they have need, we are helping people only at the point of extreme need: desperation. We are helping people once they have been evicted, once the electricity has been cut off, or once health is so impaired that employment is no longer an option. (Despite what many would have us believe, the majority of people will only reach out for help when they have desperately exhausted all their own resources.)

This approach has a number of major downfalls. It can be incredibly expensive and complicated to help a person recover from desperate need. And America is typically not kind to people without resources: late fees pile up, interest rates and charges rise, credit scores plummet, evictions happen. When the church asks people to reach out when in need, it’s often already too late. It’s like asking a snakebite victim to only reach out for help when they lose consciousness or their kidneys begin to fail.

A more strategic approach is to help people at the point of vulnerability, not need. We do this by being proactive. We ask people to consider in advance their resources and their ability to weather a shock: how are their savings, health insurance and access to reasonable and appropriate forms of credit? We also ask people to consider their likelihood of encountering a shock: how is their job security, health vulnerability and home demographics?

We then begin a risk assessment on the scenarios that create vulnerability (job loss, medical bills, car breakdown) and proactively address those circumstances — rather than waiting for people to fall into the category we have pre-assigned to be “poverty” and then devise plans to come to their assistance. Stemming the generation of new poverty becomes our high priority — perhaps even higher than reducing existing poverty per se.

When we take such a strategic approach, we ask people to do what many churches previously thought unthinkable: we ask them to be in touch the moment they encounter a trigger event: any event that is likely to severely disrupt their ability to be self-sufficient, such as a job loss or large medical treatment. When this is our approach, it’s more like asking a snakebite victim to make their way to hospital the moment they are bitten, setting off for a plan of treatment while the injury is still localized. This allows us to connect the person with people and potential resources to help them return quickly to self-sufficiency.

In this new era of churches (and other compassionate organizations) needing to do more with less, it is faster, more logical and more cost-effective to avert the onset of poverty in the first instance than to provide assistance only after someone has fallen into poverty. Perhaps most importantly, when people are given an opportunity to “re-track”, or thwart the onset of poverty in the first place, a person’s sense of dignity is maintained.

Strategic compassion acts at the point of vulnerability, not just need.

Let’s get smart, so we can do more good.

Originally published at https://www.phillipbarnard.com on June 17, 2020.

Photo by Mihály Köles on Unsplash