With its U.S. headquarters in Federal Way and offices in 99 countries, World Vision is the largest Christian humanitarian relief organization in the world. World Vision focuses on ending poverty and hunger for children and families.
Rich Stearns joined World Vision as president in 1998, following leadership positions at companies including Parker Brothers, The Franklin Mint and Lenox. He is author of the 2009 book “The Hole in Our Gospel: What does God expect of us? The answer that changed my life and might just change the world.”
On May 15, Stearns sat down with The Mirror to discuss his invitation by President Barack Obama back in February to join the advisory council of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.
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Mirror: How do you see your role on the advisory council, and how do you see World Vision’s role changing or growing?
Rich Stearns: A lot of this remains to be seen. What President Obama has said is that he wants this council, which is very diverse, to dig into four issues. Those four issues are making abortions less frequent in America; number two is assisting in the economic recovery — how can faith-based and neighborhood organizations assist in the economic recovery because in a time like this, more people are homeless, the food banks need more food, the soup kitchens need to serve more meals. Even things like drug addiction programs become more important as people are driven into economic dire straits.
Number three is responsible fatherhood, which includes things like how do we reduce teenage pregnancies and how do we strengthen families, especially for the poor. President Obama’s got a particular penchant for that, I think because he sees the problem with intact families and fathers in the African American community in particular.
The fourth is a kind of a broad international religious cooperation and understanding.
What do you mean?
To say it a different way, how can faith-based organizations better promote international religious harmony? There’s one task force of the council that will be focused on interfaith religious dialogue. There’s another task force that will be focused on international development in the world of faith-based organizations in what we do, relief and development.
How will Obama’s approach to faith-based partnerships and initiatives compare to George W. Bush’s along those lines? Do you see any differences or similarities?
I think in some ways it’s continuing. When President Bush announced his faith-based initiative, one of his goals was to — he called it leveling the playing field, so that faith-based organizations could compete for government grants on a level playing field with non-faith-based organizations. In many places in government, faith-based organizations were either not welcome, or the red tape was such that it was really too difficult for faith-based organizations to get their act together to apply for grants because they required quite a bit of administrative red tape — difficult for small organizations in particular to fill out all the forms and comply with all the reporting requirements.
Initially it was to look at every department of the government and say: Are you friendly to faith-based organizations, and do they have a legitimate opportunity to partner with the government and receive government grants?
So I think President Obama wants to continue that part of it. When we met with him in the Oval Office, he said something like this: I was a community organizer in Chicago in the neighborhoods, and he said, I saw the effectiveness of local and faith-based organizations. And he said, you were the folks who always took care of folks who fell through the cracks. And he said, you didn’t care whether they were Muslim, Christian, Atheist, Jewish — if they needed help, you were there to help them. And he said that’s what makes America strong, the vitality of our faith communities, the vitality of our neighborhood organizations. He said, I want to support that, I want to help that, I don’t want to hinder it. Because it’s kind of the safety net below the safety net.
So I think he’s sincere about how we help faith-based organizations be more successful in the delivery of social services. How can the government facilitate that? It’s not always monetary. There are probably other ways the government could facilitate partnerships. It might be something like allowing access to some of the public schools or the prisons. There are things for the government to facilitate partnerships that don’t involve money, maybe just lowering barriers and giving access to faith-based and neighborhood organizations.
What are your thoughts on the relationship between faith or Christianity and U.S. government? You have people that say separation. But obviously there’s a common cause here, say with World Vision, for example, in ending poverty.
I have some pretty strong feelings about this. We live in a pluralistic society that represents many nationalities, many faiths, many world views, many value systems in our culture. If we start excluding organizations from a relationship with the government because of their world view… you know, Planned Parenthood has a set of values and beliefs and a world view. They’re not disqualified from receiving government funds just because they have strong values. Same with the Sierra Club or conservation organizations.
World Vision is a Christian organization that has a world view that’s motivated by our faith and driven by our faith. We say “Look, we will never use government money to promote our religion, and we will never use government money in a way that discriminates against the people we serve.”
Imagine if we ran a homeless shelter and said only Christians are welcome. That would be a violation of church and state, and the government should never fund that. We understand that and we would never do that, and we would make it available to anyone. Just like when we do foreign assistance and development programs around the world; we help people of all faiths. We don’t have criteria, we don’t require that they listen to a religious message. We just want to help. We want to be able to compete for those grants based on how good we are and doing what we do. We don’t want any preferential treatment because we’re faith-based, but we also don’t want to be discriminated against because we’re faith-based.
It just so happens that 75 percent of the taxpayers in America are Christian; 75 percent of America will self-declare themselves as Christian of one stripe or another. So it doesn’t seem unreasonable to me that the government would partner with an organization that shares the values of 75 percent of Americans, nor do I think it’s unreasonable that the government should partner with Jewish organizations or Muslim organizations if the quality of their work is competitive and the government needs a job done. We believe we should have access. We do think there should be firewalls that prevent the use of government money for religious purposes. I think that’s a value that most Americans support.
I read an article you wrote in 2005 for the Seattle Times called “The face of America should meet the face of poverty.” I was really struck by your story about Chafuli …
That’s him right there. (Points to a portrait on his office wall of a young boy who was head of his household in Mozambique)
Is that the ideal success story for World Vision, or is that like a worst-case scenario?
We run into children like Chafuli all the time. The children of the world in poverty are in crisis. They’re ravaged by malaria, they’re ravaged by water-borne diseases from unsafe water, they’re ravaged by hunger, they’re exploited, they’re trafficked, they’re put into bonded labor.
The children of the world have a pretty rough go of it right now, especially the children of the 3 billion poor in the world. If I had to estimate, there’s probably a billion children in the world that are severely at risk because of all of these factors.
At World Vision, our slogan is building a better world for children. Our focus when we go into communities is how do we make life better for these children, how do we make sure they have better access to nutrition, to health care, to clean water, to education, to economic opportunity.
It’s like a canary in the coal mine: If the children are doing badly, the community is probably doing badly. If the children are doing well, the community is probably doing well. By looking at the children and focusing on them, we do community development kind of work that hopefully the whole community becomes healthier.
An excerpt from your book said the poor are hungry, and hunger keeps them poor, but that hunger is just a symptom of poverty. Is it a goal to clear up that misconception — Americans see the skinny kids from Africa and think, ‘Oh they don’t have food,’ but it’s deeper than that. How do you try to clear up misconceptions?
You’re right, I think Americans tend to think if you say poverty in the Third World, they think hungry child, which is true, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
We talk a lot about getting at the root causes. Well what are the root causes of poverty? And if you look at something like hunger — well, what’s the root cause? They don’t have enough food. Well, why don’t they have enough food? It could be that the agricultural production is subpar and the community is not able to produce enough food to feed the community adequately. Well, why is the agricultural production subpar? Well they don’t have access to more advanced seed varieties, crop rotation methods, fertilizers — it could be a variety of things. Or it could be that the government does not allow the farmers to have enough land to farm. It could be a government policy issue that’s keeping them hungry. It could be climate change: They used to get regular rains and they don’t anymore. And so these people are trapped in an area where there’s no longer enough rain.
I was just in Ethiopia last week. Their rainy season is three months of the year, so how do you grow enough food in three months to last the community for the next nine? One of the things that World Vision has implemented there is, number one, an irrigation system that allows them to grow crops off-season by irrigating. It involves a pumping station by the Awash River that pumps water out of the river and through some canals into the fields so that they can grow two or three crops a year instead of one. It produces a lot more food; it triples the food production in the area. The other thing we’re doing is water catchment systems where they’re kind of in-ground concrete tanks. When it does rain there, there’s flooding, so it’s feast or famine. During the flooding, the water channels into these concrete tanks in the ground, and when the rainy season’s over, they’ve got 100,000 gallons of water in the ground in their tank. They can pump it out in their fields to irrigate, they can use it for drinking. So we’re getting at the root causes of hunger by addressing these other things.
It’s so multi-layered.
It’s multi-layered. We try to talk about the root causes, or another way to think of it is: Don’t put a band-aid on the problem — address the underlying disease.
Poverty is multi-functional or multi-caused. Unclean water results in bad health, and if there’s no health care, it just makes it even worse. You get sick from the water, and there’s no doctor to see, so the child mortality rate is off the charts.
The children and the adults are always sick and because they’re always sick, they don’t have the same productivity. If you and I were really sick, we wouldn’t be very productive in our jobs. And we don’t have manual labor jobs. Try to be sick all day and plow the fields with an ox. It’s back-breaking labor, and if you’re sick and you’re vomiting and you have diarrhea, you’re not very productive. They’re all interrelated.
Here’s another one most people are surprised at: Education — why aren’t children in school? Because there’s no water in the community, the children get up at four in the morning. They walk five miles with big jerry cans with their mother, and they spend five hours in the morning and five hours in the afternoon fetching dirty water so they have water to drink and to cook and to bathe, and they can’t go to school because they’re fetching water all day.
I was at a school in Ghana where World Vision had put clean water in the community — these deep boreholes and hand pumps that are capped off at the top. There was a pump right next to the school and the headmaster said “five years ago before we had the well, I had 40 students. Today I have 400 in the same school.” The only difference? Clean water. The children don’t have to fetch water anymore. So they’re going to school because they don’t have to fetch water. And they’re healthier because the water is pure, so they can learn better because they’re healthier.
Does the quest for survival push everything else to the side?
I go through a little exercise in my book and say: Imagine if you woke up tomorrow and there was no water in your house, and none of the water appliances worked. None of the sinks, none of the hoses, dishwasher, washing machine. It might be inconvenient at first, but imagine if that was what you faced every day. Forget about work. You can’t live without water. So your whole family — it would be a quest for survival. How do we get water? You wouldn’t be thinking about “How do I earn a living?” You’d be thinking, “How do I get water to live until tomorrow?” Now add food to that — there’s no food, there’s no water. And you get a picture that they’re living a survival kind of existence, and they can never get above that to be productive.
I always like to say water and food are the foundations to civilization, the foundations to progress. Until you address those, you can’t unleash the potential of the community to dream dreams and do other things.
Tell me how your own faith guides the work you do every day, from the little things to the big things.
Frankly, the easier thing for you or I to do about global poverty is ignore it. It’s not a pretty thing to think about. It’s hard to deal with. There’s a lot of heartbreak in getting involved with it. There’s what has been called “compassion fatigue” — how long can we continue to feel compassion when the need seems overwhelming and never goes away? So for all those reasons, it would be a lot easier to say “You know what? I’m not even going to think about global poverty. I’m not going to worry about. I live in America, things are better here. Let those people worry about themselves.”
But the way my faith comes into play is my faith doesn’t allow that. As a Christian, I am compelled and actually commanded by God to care for the poor, to love my neighbor as myself, to not be apathetic. And it’s inconvenient that my God tells me that. It’s inconvenient that the Bible says that because that means it’s going to cost me money, it’s going to cost me time, it’s going to cost me sacrifice to help people that I don’t even know. Human nature is like, let’s take care of number one first, right? We take care of hopefully our own family, or if we have friends in need, most of us are going to help.
The idea of helping strangers 10,000 miles away is something that, for me, only my faith motivates me enough to do it. I’m not a good enough person that if I didn’t have this faith or what I understand to be God’s truth, I’m probably not a good enough person to just do it because I want to be good. But if God asks me to do it, I feel like, well if God’s asking, that’s a whole different thing. I need to listen to that, I need to do that. It might cost some sacrifice, but so be it.
This is a calling.
It’s a calling. I probably do it more for God than I do for my fellow man, in some ways. And yet, I know people that aren’t religious people that have great compassion, so I’m not suggesting that only Christians have – maybe I’m saying I’m not a good enough person that I would be like that if I wasn’t a Christian. There are some wonderful people who are atheist that care a great deal about the poor and work tirelessly to help them, and I admire people like that.
What would you like to see happen locally in Federal Way? You’ve got this organization with worldwide reach right here in Federal Way. Federal Way people need to know that this is in their backyard.
Sometimes I feel like Federal Way doesn’t know what they’ve got. We’re now the largest humanitarian organization in the world of any kind. We have 40,000 employees in 99 countries. I used to say that Seattle is proud of Microsoft, coffee, Amazon, Boeing. But I think the thing Seattle should be most proud of is that we’re exporting compassion. World Vision, the Gates Foundation, PATH (Program for Appropriate Technology in Health) and even programs of the University of Washington.
This is one of the great centers in the world right now of international development and relief and health, and yet it’s often below the radar screen. We don’t factor that into our identity as Puget Sound residents. I think Federal Way should be very proud to be the home of an organization like World Vision. Kind of like Mother Teresa lives right here.
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Fast facts
• World Vision employs about 800 people on its Federal Way campus, with another 400 employees scattered across the United States. Globally, World Vision has 40,000 employees in 99 countries.
• Last year, World Vision’s office in Federal Way raised about $1.1 billion of the total $2.6 billion raised globally. That money served more than 100 million people all over the world.
• World Vision was founded in 1951 by Dr. Robert Pierce. The organization started caring for orphans in South Korea and eventually expanded.
• About 40 percent of revenue comes from private sources, and about 27 percent comes from governments and aid agencies, according to World Vision. Half of World Vision’s programs are funded through child sponsorship.
