Sacred Road and Economic Development

This is an announcement we have long awaited to be able to share. March 8th was our 2-year anniversary of living here on the Reservation. It has taken us some time to get here, find a place to live, and be part of the ministry. We are just starting to learn about the culture, about poverty issues, and becoming familiar with current economic development ideas.

We have determined a plan of action for our economic development efforts here on the Yakama Indian Reservation.

Summary of Project
Basic job skills and financial literacy are limited with youth and young adults in the White Swan community. Many youth do not graduate from high school. Even if they do graduate, they are often not prepared for college. They have limited examples of working, career minded adults. Many lack the character skills to take advantage of employment opportunities. We seek to help build character skills in the youth of White Swan to make future employees.

We are starting a silk-screening business with the purpose of teaching youth and young adults vocational skills by running an actual small business. We will combine this small business training with WorkLife (learn more about this class here) and Financial Literacy curricula to provide additional job skill training in a classroom setting. Youth involved in the program can either stay in the program to work in the business or move on to other business opportunities.

Character Skills
There is economic research done by Nobel prize winning economist James Heckman, that shows character skills (emotional stability, agreeableness, extra-version, conscientiousness, and openness) predict a wide range of life outcomes, including educational achievement, labor market outcomes, health, and criminality. The predictive power of character skills rivals that of measures of cognitive ability (IQ). Sacred Road currently has limited ability to help with cognitive and education levels, however we can be involved in helping individuals learn character skills.

Programs intended to help young adults that are the most promising integrate aspects of work into traditional education. In years past, adolescents took apprenticeships where they were supervised and mentored by adults. This mentoring involved teaching valuable character skills—showing up for work, cooperating with others, and persevering on tasks. Many skills not fostered in today's high schools. We hope to be able to have a program that recovers the combination of vocational and character skills.

Proposed Program
We seek to combine actual vocational training through the operation of a small business with job skill training of the WorkLife curriculum. This serves to replicate a more traditional apprenticeship program.

There are many different skills youth will have the opportunity to learn in the business operations portion of this program. The youth will be involved in the purchasing of materials and supplies; creating t-shirt designs; computer software skills; printing and developing film; creating silk screens; printing t-shirts and sweatshirts and even posters; taking pictures for website sales; listing products on the website, and packing and shipping sold t-shirts.

We also foresee the youth involved in the marketing and selling portion of the business, and learning communication and presentation skills. They will also have opportunities for janitorial and other more basic skills.

The WorkLife curriculum provides basic job skills information that is significantly needed. This curriculum is written from a Christian perspective and provides the following skills: the need to arrive at work on time and consistently, resume preparation, job interviewing skills, conflict management skills, and the need for adapting to a workplace environment, among others. We will also add a financial literacy component once the WorkLife class is completed.

Providing youth with character skill training while showing them they can learn new skills and succeed will help provide a foundation in which future employment opportunities can be built.

I'll keep you updated on the progress of this program as we move forward. Let me know if you have any questions or might be interested in helping out in some way.

Banker to the Poor

I just finished a book written by Dr. Muhammad Yunus, titled "Banker to the Poor:  Micro-lending and the Battle Against World Poverty."  Yunus was an economics professor and head of the Economics Department at Chittagong University in Bangladesh before starting Grameen, a bank devoted to providing the poorest of Bangladesh with micro-loans as a way to help the poor lift themselves out of poverty.  As I begin a crash course in learning about economic development and what people have done around the world I found this to be a really interesting book.

Yunus became disenchanted with theoretical economics and decided to spend time directly with the poor to try to figure out how he might be able to truly help the poor, rather than just talking about helping the poor. What he stumbled upon was this idea of making small loans to the poor so they might use that capital to buy the equipment, tools or supplies to start their own business and provide for themselves rather than be dependent on those with capital who tended to take advantage of the poor.

He has some interesting thoughts regarding the Left's ideological position regarding the State being the solution to the poor's plight and also the Right's ideological position of trickle down economics.  I thought I would share some of his thoughts in this post as a way get people thinking about ways to help those in financial need. (In no way does this book attempt to deal with the spiritual, emotional or is it in any way Christian.  But it does raise some very interesting questions and analysis of how to help the poor from a financial and economic perspective.)

"In the United States I saw how the market liberates the individual and allows people to be free to make personal choices.  But the biggest drawback was that the market always pushes things to the side of the powerful.  I thought the poor should be able to take advantage of the system in order to improve their lot.

Grameen is a private-sector self-help bank, and as its members gain personal wealth they acquire water-pumps, latrines, housing, education, access to health care, and so on.

Another way to achieve this is to let business earn profit that is then taxed by the government, and the tax can be used to provide services to the poor.  But in practice it never works that way.  In real life, taxes only pay for a government bureaucracy that collects the tax and provides little or nothing to the poor.  And since most government bureaucracies are not profit motivated, they have little incentive to increase their efficiency.  In fact, they have a disincentive: governments often cannot cut social services without a public outcry, so the behemoth continues, blind and inefficient, year after year.

Poverty is not created by the poor.  It is created by the structures of society and the policies pursued by society.  Change the structure as we are doing in Bangladesh, and you will see that the poor change their own lives.

Somehow we have persuaded ourselves that the capitalist economy must be fueled only by greed.  This has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Only the profit maximizers get to play in the marketplace and try their luck.

We can condemn the private sector for all its mistakes, but we cannot justify why we ourselves are not trying to change things, not trying to make things better by participating in the economy."  Pgs 203-206

Please know that I'm not advocating anything here.  Nor am I trying to come up with any solution separate from Biblical principles.  But I think Yunus brings up some interesting things to consider.

"But godliness with contentment is great gain, for we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world.  But if we have food and clothing, with these we will be content. But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs."  I Timothy 6:6-10