Steve Corbett

As a how-to guide on some of the dynamics of good community development, When Helping Hurts has some helpful insights. As an evangelical theology of poverty and "helping", it is passable – but in a field not exactly crowded with contenders. As a reflection on the causes and consequences of poverty, it is – haha – poor. As an analysis of the systems and structures that make and keep people poor, it is shamefully inadequate.

Some reviewers have labelled this as paradigm-busting or show more revolutionary. It's certainly on a lot of reading lists in the mission / development / Christian circles in which I once moved. I suppose if you – like many North American evangelicals – have been victim to teaching that leaves you unable to connect a concern for people in poverty with the Gospel, then this book does offer a few steps forward. Firmly set within a standard evangelical account of the Bible's "grand narrative" from creation, to fall, to redemption and new creation, it mounts the case that the church needs to "declare – using both words and deeds – that Jesus is the King of kings... who is bringing a kingdom of righteousness, justice, and peace." Hooray for that!

However, it poses this entirely within a framework entirely familiar to, and comfortable for, North American evangelicals – neoliberal capitalism. The solution to poverty (without hurting) it turns out is disciplining and rewarding people to strive harder as self-actualising entrepreneurs within the system that has impoverished them.

Acknowledging the positive: When Helping Hurts is modestly helpful on some of the dynamics of good development, and provides some useful tools for reflection. It highlights some of the ways in which "helping" – particularly patronising, context-insensitive, overbearing, or just plain dumb ways of helping – can "hurt". If you've never heard of "assets-based community development" (starting from a community's strengths, resources and relationships rather than its problems or deficiencies), it provides some helpful insights and tools. If you've never considered that "helping" by giving gift boxes to poor children might, in fact, exacerbate feelings of shame and powerlessness within the child's family, or that "short-term missions" might provide more good feels for participants than actual good for the communities they visit, it provides a necessary wake-up call. I agree wholeheartedly with the all too brief section on "the poison of paternalism" and its summary of the iron law of community organising: "Do not do things for people that they can do for themselves". Though it should be noted that this principle is not about encouraging a kind of "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" self-reliance nor a denial of any sense of interdependence or obligation. Rather, it is a recognition of the dignity and agency of those who are part of the community in poverty and an acknowledgement that those affected should be empowered to make decisions and take actions for themselves and with others, rather than being merely subject merely to the actions and whims of those with power over them.

It's ironic, though, that the section decrying paternalism will follow mere pages after an imaginary case-study focused on a person who knocks on doors in a neighbourhood, asking for help to pay for an electricity bill. Money, you might think, is at the root of this person's problems. No, the authors hasten to assure us.

"But what if this person's fundamental problem is not having the self-discipline to keep a stable job? Simply giving this person money is treating the symptoms rather than the underlying disease and will enable him to continue with his lack of self-discipline... A better – and far more costly – solution would be for your church to develop a relationship with this person, a relationship that says, "We are here to walk with you and to help you use your gifts and abilities to avoid being in this situation in the future. Let us into your life and let us work with you to determine the reason you are in this predicament."

It's difficult to imagine a more patronising approach. And the framing of the hypothetical is convenient and self-serving – the imaginary beggar's problem is a lack of self-discipline, not chronic poverty, not structural unemployment, not health- or education-related debt, just to name a few... Oh, and I'm pretty sure that doctors treat symptoms (as well as the underlying disease) all the time – it's really not an either/or.

To be fair, the book does pose a modest challenge to wealthy (North American) Christians of the evangelical persuasion to take seriously the deep scandal of global poverty, hunger and inequality. It draws on Bryant Myers' richer analysis in Walking with the Poor: Principles and Practice of Transformational Development to skewer the "god-complexes" of the non-poor, who might assume that they are superior and have the answers to the problems faced by poor people. Though – to preview some of my complaints – it undercuts this challenge fairly consistently by substituting one form of paternalism for another and by assuring the wealthy that a "material definition of poverty" is part of the problem, that sharing or redistributing wealth may cause more problems than it solves, and that people will only genuinely be free from poverty when they 1) have found Jesus and 2) have liberated their entrepreneurial selves in service of the economy's relentless demands (often via some tough love from their wealthy neighbours).

Sadly, the seeds of the work's problems are sown early and deep – arising from the book's fundamental confusion between the multidimensionality of people's experiences of poverty (which include shame, isolation, vulnerability, powerlessness, exhaustion and the like) and a univocal definition of poverty – which is unambiguously and fundamentally about material deprivation. While acknowledging that their material deprivation is what makes people in poverty worthy of particular attention and care, the authors want to argue that a "material definition of poverty" is part of the problem when it comes to helping.

Poverty, they argue (borrowing from Bryant L. Myers) is fundamentally a matter of failed relationships (with God, self, others and creation). To back up this contention, they quote from the World Bank's magisterial study, Voices of the Poor: From Many Lands in which people in poverty describe their own experiences, including hunger, vulnerability, shame, dependence, social isolation, powerlessness, exhaustion and the like. They argue that because this multidimensionality is integral to any true definition of poverty, a merely "material definition of poverty" is part of the problem, blinding well-meaning people to poverty's root causes and to its solutions.

"The problem [of poverty] goes well beyond the material dimension, so the solutions must go beyond the material as well."

However, this is to confuse the effects or experiences of poverty (including shame, powerlessness, isolation, etc.) with its essence (material deprivation), poverty's marks for its meaning.

Certainly, the experiences of people in poverty go far beyond merely material deprivation, and poverty's effects are not solely financial. But poverty's experiences and effects are rooted in material deprivation, and any sane definition of poverty is all about a lack of material resources. All other metaphorical extensions of poverty's meaning (such as "poverty of spirit" in the gospels or "poverty of being" in this work) are dependent on this root, brutely material, meaning.

Sure, as the authors argue, the poor and the non-poor may both experience shame, powerlessness, isolation, etc. and experience the same brokenness in relationships. The difference between the two groups (and the very definition of poverty) is precisely that one experiences material deprivation which drives and deepens those experiences.

The trouble with defining poverty in ways that minimise material deprivation and with promoting solutions that minimise the requirement to attend to wealth redistribution or dismantle systems that impoverish individuals, communities and nations, is that you have already come close to arguing that money and material resources (who has it, who doesn't, and what they do about that) isn't at the root of poverty and any meaningful response to it. The authors of When Helping Hurts attempt, but in my view ultimately fail, to resist the temptation to mount just such an argument.

I'm not arguing that dependence and disempowerment isn't (or can't be) a problem in responses to poverty. Nor am I arguing that giving money is always the best response to someone in need. I am simply arguing that redistributing wealth and ending affluence may well be a necessary condition for ending poverty.

Despite some acknowledgement of structural or systemic causes/drivers of poverty – such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund's imposition of structural adjustment on developing nations in the 1980s and 1990s or structural racism in the United States – the authors do not spend any time considering political advocacy, public campaigning, or revolution any part of the strategy for responding to poverty. Perhaps predictably, the authors present microfinance as the paradigmatic way to respond to poverty.

It is truly instructive, too, that their advocacy for microfinance (small loans made to poor people to establish income-generating initiatives) is presented entirely from the perspective of the lender!

They relate the story of Muhammed Yunus (founder of Bangladesh's Grameen Bank – one of the world's biggest microcredit lenders):

"The professor reached into his pocket and lent Sufiya and forty-one of her neighbors a total of twenty-seven dollars. To the amazement of observers, the loans were fully repaid on time. Contrary to the received wisdom, it was possible to lend money to very poor people and get it paid back."

As if the main issue to be considered with microfinance is the rate of return for lenders!

While they do consider what they see as some of the "pros and cons" or microfinance – again, these relate primarily to the concerns of lenders and their ability to reach particular populations of poor people. But it is not the case that microfinance's problem is simply that it fails to reach the poorest and most excluded people. There is now very good evidence that microfinance may help to smooth the incomes of (some) poor people and help them hedge their bets in the face of financial insecurity but that it simply does not make fundamental change in the lives of poor people. The authors do not engage with this research at all. It also never seems to occur to them that lending extremely small sums of money to extremely poor people selling extremely low value-added products in communities of other extremely poor people might have some limitations when it comes to ending poverty!

This blindness when it comes to microfinance is replicated in other ways. As this review is already, um, long, I'll mention only two in closing.

A bias towards capitalist, entrepreneurial solutions (as opposed to other political and communal responses) is evident throughout but one minor argument exemplifies the problem. The authors quote uncritically William Easterly's contention in The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good that aid has failed because,
Despite an estimated $2.3 trillion in foreign aid dispensed from Western nations during the post-World War II era, more than 2.5 billion people, approximately 40 per cent of the world's population, still live on less than two dollars a day.

At first blush, this sounds like a knockout argument that aid has failed. $2.3 trillion is, for almost everyone I know, a massive amount of money and yet 2.5 billion people, which is far larger number of people than I can imagine, still live in poverty!! Surely there could be no clearer evidence that helping by giving money is a fool's errand.

Yet, this "argument" is, to be blunt, nonsense. Like every human endeavour, international humanitarian and development assistance can be implemented well or poorly or anywhere in between. But aid has not "failed" to help vast numbers of poor people, reducing maternal and child mortality, increasing school enrolment, and supporting the basics of life. Easterly's factoid is vastly less substantial than it first appears.

$2.3 trillion is also a much smaller amount in reality than it appears to be in Easterly's big, quotable, statistic. $2.3 trillion over the five post-war decades to the time Easterly is writing amounts to just $48 billion per year. In 1981 (to take a rough mid-point of the period) the global population was around 4.5 billion people, with roughly 2 billion people living in extreme poverty.

Which means that even if every cent of that aid over those decades was directed to addressing the poverty of the world's poorest people, the supposed largesse of "Western nations" amounts to just $24 per person each year. And, of course, it is not the case that all of this aid was given to address poverty. Roughly half the aid given in 1981 was given in the form of loans, not grants. Huge sums of aid was given not to end poverty, but to prop up favoured regimes (such as Egypt or Turkey) and had no benefit at all for the poor.

What should we imagine this $24 (to play along with Easterly's unstated and unrealistic assumptions) was supposed to achieve? Even for the very poorest people, its probably unreasonable to think that 7 cents per person per day is going to go a long way towards ending poverty. Under the Marshall Plan, the US invested more than $200 per citizen in the European nations they helped back on their feet after World War II.

Oh, and the fact that there are still poor people around even after aid has been given is no argument at all. Developed nations spend billions each year on health and there are still sick people!

Finally – and, for me, most fundamentally – the theology undergirding Corbett and Fikkert's analysis and prescriptions is extraordinarily deficient. Their one and only reference to "all that the Bible says on the difficult topic" of whether or not you should always give to someone who asks – which appears to be at the heart of their thesis about helping without hurting – is a footnote pointing to Neither Poverty Nor Riches: Illuminating the Riddle. The judicious balance sounded in that book's title gets to the heart of the problem. Yes, the Bible's witness on poverty and wealth is various and not easily reconcilable. There are different and seemingly incompatible streams of tradition on the topic - from the stolid and aphoristic Wisdom traditions of the Proverbs to the extreme and denunciatory prophetic traditions of Amos and Jesus.

I can understand the temptation to seek a middle ground. Yet, the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Jesus does not call us to any sort of via media, to a balancing of extremes. God calls people to take sides because God, in Christ, takes the side of the unloved, the marginalised, and the poor. And the scandal, indeed crime, of global inequality and environmental destruction requires us to swap a comfortable and manufactured "objectivity", for a challenging and determinedly located "option for the poor".

When Helping Hurts is probably worth reading. But it should not be anyone's final word in thinking about and responding to poverty. A helpful next step would be to read Bryant Myers' Walking with the Poor: Principles and Practice of Transformational Development, from which the authors freely draw and the Gustavo Gutierrez's A Theology of Liberation, from which they avowedly do not draw. show less

When Helping Hurts by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert is a Christian perspective on helping the poor that might well stand to benefit anyone, Christian or otherwise, who has tried to help someone they perceive to be less well-off then themselves. In today's world where the prevailing method of helping people is an impersonal rubber stamp of "I built X many houses and schools" or "I helped get food to X many children" that serves the giver more than the recipient, Corbett and Fikkert ask us show more to consider spending the time necessary to tailor our help to a community's needs and, even more, incorporate those being helped into the process so that they will be empowered to seek and maintain lasting change for their communities even after the outside help leaves. Corbett and Fikkert's book wisely advises its readers to always consider themselves to be just as needy in one way or another as the people they are helping thus avoiding the almost-inevitable God complex, the unwelcome guest that always comes along with our better intentions of helping people who have been rendered unable to help themselves. When Helping Hurts is a definite must-read for anyone who wants to create lasting and empowering benefit from the help they have to offer those less fortunate. show less

When Helping Hurts by Steve Corbett & Brian Fikkert is a book I set my sites on some time ago but thinking it may be a load of tosh I put off reading it. That is, until I received a verbal recommendation from a trusted relative I then decided it was time to dig in. As it turns out it is not a load of rubbish but rather a well thought out analysis of how we as individual Christians, churches, and parachurch organizations have failed, often miserably, at assisting the poor and alleviating show more poverty and how to address these issues.

From the back cover we learn what we can expect from the book

Foundation Concepts – Who are the poor?
Principles – Should we do relief, rehabilitation or development?
Strategies – How can we help people here and abroad?

And that is the thrust of the work. These three points are fleshed out by the authors.

The book begins with a short history of how we, primarily North American Christians, got to where we are now. What happened between 1900 and 1930 that changed how we address poverty alleviation and why we are failing miserably at addressing it? Why is a Biblical world view important to the methodology of helping the poor?

Next we find out what the poor think of our efforts to help them. Its entirely possible we fail as we have no clue how other cultures, even sub-cultures within our own culture, think emotionally and politically of their plight. Failure to recognize these distinctions cause our failures in assisting the poor and therefore our evangelism. From our North American point of view are we really helping the poor or just making ourselves feel better by thinking we have? Poverty is rooted in broken relationships, with God and each other, not in financial or material wealth. Only Jesus can fix that.

In chapter 4 we begin to get into the real meat of the work. Help comes in three forms according to the authors: Relief, rehabilitation, and development. Failure to recognize these three and implement them as needed or in correct order can do more harm than good. Many churches and organizations, for example, start and stop with relief. That is, providing immediate help for a need. Though necessary it falls short of providing for the long term needs of the person or persons in need. The authors flesh this out clearly and define what steps, relief, rehabilitation, and development, to take at appropriate times.

Of chapter 7 I took special note. Short term mission trips (STM) have always left me wondering how effective they can be. How can a group of people who blow into town for only a week or two expect to provide any long lasting good? Indeed, they can be helpful as the authors explain however they are often not for several reasons the authors lay out. If only relief is provided the STM is doomed to failure. Development is often what is needed and that can’t be done in a two week STM. In helping the poor we must be in it for the long haul by helping the local churches and organizations in the area as necessary.

The authors continue and conclude with concrete strategies to help the poor in numerous ways and especially spiritually. The issue is often, "Finding armies of people to volunteer one Saturday to paint dilapidated houses is easy. Finding people to love the people who live in those houses is extremely difficult" (pg. 210). We must take the time to walk and love these folks for the long term. Are you ready? Am I ready?

This is a justifiable read. The authors are intelligent and experienced. Expert analysis, true life accounts, and clear strategies are provided. I wholeheartedly commend When Helping Hurts . show less

I was interested in the subject conveyed in the title: when can trying to help people instead cause harm? This book answers that to some extent and gave me a lot to think about. But as someone who isn't interested in being a missionary, starting a micro-finance or loan program, or leading anything of that nature, its value was low for me. I gave this five stars because it was good, but there were really only ~2 chapters that were beneficial for me.