Book List

This is our #1 recommendation if you are beginning to wonder if your organization is no longer helping those you serve. If, after reading this, you want to dig deeper, give us a call, and we would LOVE to connect you with more resources. 

In this book, Robert Lupton reveals the shockingly toxic effects that modern charity has upon the very people meant to benefit from it. Toxic Charity shows us how to start serving needy and impoverished members of our communities in a way that will lead to lasting, real-world change.

This is our #2 recommendation - Across the globe - from the remote villages and cities of Indonesia, Eastern Europe, South America, and Bangladesh - "If I Had a Water Buffalo" poignantly details an unending journey of discovery for Dr. Marilyn Fitzgerald. Her global efforts, working as a conduit between donors and recipients, provide an unparalleled opportunity to observe, learn from successes and failures, and ultimately focus on finding a better way. A way for those less fortunate that is not paved with uncertainty and dependency but rather built upon a foundation of voice, dignity, choice, empowerment, and a means to achieve self-sufficiency.

Excellent insight into well-intentioned helping that erodes dignity and falls short of what can be done when the person being helped is involved and engaged in the process.

Poverty is much more than simply a lack of material resources, and it takes much more than donations and handouts to solve it. When Helping Hurts shows how some alleviation efforts, failing to consider the complexities of poverty, have actually (and unintentionally) done more harm than good.

But it looks ahead. It encourages us to see the dignity in everyone, to empower the materially poor, and to know that we are all uniquely needy—and that God in the gospel is reconciling all things to himself.

Focusing on both North American and Majority World contexts, When Helping Hurts provides proven strategies for effective poverty alleviation, catalyzing the idea that sustainable change comes not from the outside in, but from the inside out. 

Bridges Out of Poverty is a unique and powerful tool designed specifically for social, health, and legal services professionals. Based in part on Dr. Ruby K. Payne's myth shattering A Framework for Understanding Poverty, 

Bridges reaches out to the millions of service providers and businesses whose daily work connects them with the lives of people in poverty. In a highly readable format you'll find case studies, detailed analysis, helpful charts and exercises, and specific solutions you and your organization can implement right now to: Redesign programs to better serve people you work with Build skill sets for management to help guide employees Upgrade training for front-line staff like receptionists, case workers, and managers; Improve treatment outcomes in health care and behavioral health care; Increase the likelihood of moving from welfare to work. 

If your business, agency, or organization works with people from poverty, only a deeper understanding of their challenges-and strengths-will help you partner with them to create opportunities for success.

In Dead Aid, Dambisa Moyo describes the state of postwar development policy in Africa today and unflinchingly confronts one of the greatest myths of our time: that billions of dollars in aid sent from wealthy countries to developing African nations has helped to reduce poverty and increase growth.

In fact, poverty levels continue to escalate and growth rates have steadily declined—and millions continue to suffer. Provocatively drawing a sharp contrast between African countries that have rejected the aid route and prospered and others that have become aid-dependent and seen poverty increase, Moyo illuminates the way in which overreliance on aid has trapped developing nations in a vicious circle of aid dependency, corruption, market distortion, and further poverty, leaving them with nothing but the “need” for more aid.

Debunking the current model of international aid, Moyo offers a bold new road map for financing development of the world’s poorest countries that guarantees economic growth and a significant decline in poverty—without reliance on foreign aid or aid-related assistance.

Provides an opportunity for gaining a foundation, rooted in lived experience and research, for understanding poverty and addressing its impacts. Chapter titles: A Foundation for Understanding Poverty; Serving People from Poverty; Laying the Foundations for Institutional and Systemic Change.

At 4:00 am, Leonida Wanyama lit a lantern in her house made of sticks and mud. She was up long before the sun to begin her farm work, as usual. But this would be no ordinary day, this second Friday of the new year. This was the day Leonida and a group of smallholder farmers in western Kenya would begin their exodus, as she said, "from misery to Canaan," the land of milk and honey. 

Africa's smallholder farmers, most of whom are women, know misery. They toil in a time warp, living and working essentially as their forebears did a century ago. With tired seeds, meager soil nutrition, primitive storage facilities, wretched roads, and no capital or credit, they harvest less than one-quarter the yields of Western farmers. The romantic ideal of African farmers -- rural villagers in touch with nature, tending bucolic fields -- is in reality a horror scene of malnourished children, backbreaking manual work, and profound hopelessness. Growing food is their driving preoccupation, and still they don't have enough to feed their families throughout the year. The wanjala -- the annual hunger season that can stretch from one month to as many as eight or nine -- abides. 

But in January 2011, Leonida and her neighbors came together and took the enormous risk of trying to change their lives. Award-winning author and world hunger activist Roger Thurow spent a year with four of them -- Leonida Wanyama, Rasoa Wasike, Francis Mamati, and Zipporah Biketi -- to intimately chronicle their efforts. In The Last Hunger Season, he illuminates the profound challenges these farmers and their families face, and follows them through the seasons to see whether, with a little bit of help from a new social enterprise organization called One Acre Fund, they might transcend lives of dire poverty and hunger. The daily dramas of the farmers' lives unfold against the backdrop of a looming global challenge: to feed a growing population, world food production must nearly double by 2050. If these farmers succeed, so might we all.

In his withering dissection of the origins and misuse of the term “underclass” to stereotype and stigmatize the poor, Herbert J. Gans shows how this ubiquitous label has relegated a wide variety of people—welfare recipients, the working poor, teenage mothers, drug addicts, the homeless, and others—to a single condemned class, feared and despised by the rest of society. Probing the deep psychological, social, and political reasons why Americans seek to indict millions of poor citizens as “undeserving,” Gans calls for a cease-fire in the undeclared war against the poor. He concludes with a set of innovative, job-centered policy proposals and a multifaceted educational plan to stop the endless flow of new recruits into America's untouchable caste.

A spiritual and moral freefall has brought fear and uncertainty throughout America. Using parallels between the biblical story of Joseph and today’s urban workers, The Triumphs of Joseph offers an inspiring and informative investigation on the neighborhood healers of the inner city who exemplify the imagination, courage, and self-help qualities required to renew impoverished communities. 

Just as Joseph rose from slavery and prison to advise the pharaoh, author Robert Woodson believes that those working at the grassroots level provide the same support to the lives of drug addicts and ex-cons in the poorest neighborhoods across America. These “modern-day Josephs…[forge] an effective internal, spiritual response to the spiritual and moral atrophy of our civil society” (Booklist) and push for a policy beyond racial and economic considerations towards a moral and spiritual revival.

Liz Murray was born to loving but drug-addicted parents in the Bronx. In school she was taunted for her dirty clothing and lice-infested hair, eventually skipping so many classes that she was put into a girls' home. At age fifteen, when her family finally unraveled, Murray found herself on the streets. She learned to scrape by, foraging for food and riding subways all night to have a warm place to sleep.

Eventually, Murray decided to take control of her own destiny and go back to high school, often completing her assignments in the hallways and subway stations where she slept. She squeezed four years of high school into two, while homeless; won a New York Times scholarship; and made it into the Ivy League. Breaking Night is an unforgettable and beautifully written story of one young woman's indomitable spirit to survive and prevail, against all odds.