[ Check out the June 11 post for more background on the Gathering. ]
Let me tell you something... Bread for the World knows how to saturate your day with inspiration and information. The day began with worship at 8:45 this morning and ended with worship at 8:30 this evening. We filled those twelve hours with workshops, speakers, networking, and an amazing performance by a children's choir from Uganda.
My notes and Blackberry shots below will fill you in on what Bread supporters accomplished today.
- Sara
Session 1: How's the Exodus Going?
Patrick Fine, VP of the Millennium Challenge Corporation
- Easy to avoid the burden of responsibility of caring for others
- Struggle to balance your nourished world with the malnourished one you serve (cognitive dissonance)
- We were not put on this earth to make ourselves rich
- Practices of principles may be unconventional
- The MCC is 100% tax funded
- Innovative business model: increasing a country's income is the only goal; help only well-governed, transparent countries
- Model is incentive for governments to improve policy to qualify for MCC help
- Ownership matters (rehab and development vs. relief)
- Ownership matters (rehab and development vs. relief)
Sample of the great music we had between sessions.
Anna Lartey, professor of food science at the University of Ghana
- Ghana's school food program feeds 1 million kids/day
- Good governance and political stability has been key
- Meats/fish/eggs, "enam," too expensive for most families in Ghana
- Microloan of $20 - $50 creates provision of education, business training (more income)
- Take home messages: There are programs that work; improving childhood nutrition is a long-term solution to prevent problems later in life
Q&A
- MCC uses impact evaluations to measure success
- MCC has high priority on gender issues; uses gender and social analysis
- Anna: successful women in micro-loan program had supportive husbands
- School feeding programs lead to increase school attendance
- Anna: education is capacity building
- MCC is investing in road development in northern Ghana, where Anna says is a hungry place because of poor infrastructure (isolation)
- Countries with weak governance need to start with strictly humanitarian aid to move forward
Workshop: The Bread Revolution Will Be Tweeted
Holly Hight and Robin Stephenson, Bread staff
Holly found a great summary of social media's role in modern communication.
- We have a people-driven economy
- Social media = sharing
- Tension between generations regarding social media's purpose
- Congress is on Twitter, so Bread's supporters need to be also
- Community vs. audience
- Relationship building
- Maslow's third level involves a sense of belonging
- No dichotomy between "real" and digital world
- Change will be a result of action online and offline
- Follow Holly and Robin!
Session 2: A Change Agenda for Effective Foreign Assistance
Dr. Rajiv Shah, administrator of USAID
- high food an gas prices push people back into poverty
- Secretary Clinton: can vs. will
- USAID top priorities are food and hunger
- Feed the Future just received $1.15B in bipartisan funding, result of Bush and Obama commitments to poverty
- World Bank spending on poverty has tripled since 2006
- Women make up 70% of farmers where USAID serves
- Focus on local cooperation
- Rigorous monitoring and evaluation; most rigorous U.S. development has ever had
- Focused results lead to good argument for support
- USAID projected to remove 18 million people from poverty; 7.1 million kids from malnutrition
- New paradigm for development: celebrity interest, business leaders, religious leaders
- We know what the choices are: disengagement or engagement
- 50% of North Korean kids are malnourished (isolate from the world)
- President Obama has the strongest foreign assistance policy since JFK
- Development is a discipline
- Diarrhea and pneumonia kill 1.6 million kids/year; vaccines coming out soon
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| Pixelated rendition of the Watoto Children's Choir out of Uganda from tonight's performance. |
Ched Myers, Bartimaeus Cooperative Ministries
- Mobilize moral and responsible citizenship, also engaged and imaginative discipleship
- Historical examples that road to end hunger are not too long and demanding: Jim Crow, Apartheid
- Food can change things: Last Supper, sit-ins
- Mark 2:23 - 28 fundamental right to have food
- In the Torah no one has 100% rights to their land. Gleaners had rights to harvested fields.
- God is true owner of the fields; some parts always reserved for the disadvantaged
- Economic instructions in Exodus (in story of manna): equitable distribution of the gift; gift should circulate, not concentrate; keep the Sabbath to remind us of the economy of grace
- Not just our citizenship, but discipleship also
- Make room for young leaders NOW
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| Ched Myers uses the Greensboro sit-ins to illustrate that worthy causes require patience. |
Session 3: A Time for Action
Rev. Gabriel Salguero, National Latino Evangelical Coalition
- Rev. Salguero's wife, also Rev. Salguero, translated his message into Spanish for the audience
- It's going to take an integrated movement, not assimilated, at God's table, not yours/mine
- Esther 4:10 - 17, Esther's principles for action; malnutrition and poverty disproportionately affect women and children
- Mordecai to Esther: the time is NOW
- Purposeful proximity-- access to power must have a purpose
- Sustainable change comes from intentional diversity
- Nothing worse than an uninformed opinion that destroys people
- Mordecai: Don't think that because you're okay now, you'll escape
- Persistent hope: hymn, "We who believe in freedom will not rest"
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