Adapted from When Helping Hurts, ch. 4.

Our goal in walking alongside any community in poverty should be working to help people move from a less stable to a more stable position. However, it is important to always keep in mind that poverty can come in many different forms, each requiring a different approach. Thus, our understanding of these different conditions is key to ensuring we respond to communities with the right kinds of help.

Since poverty can look different for different people, the way we respond to it should adapt depending on the situation. Material poverty is complex, and often looks different in different places, over time, or even in one person’s lifetime. That’s why we shouldn’t think of situations as simple or separate boxes. Instead, we can use the framework of relief, rehabilitation, and development, to figure out the best way to help. When we understand this, we can respond in a better and kinder way.

As we’ve shared before, Relief seeks to stop the bleeding of a crisis when people are helpless and failure to act would result in long-term harm. This is how most people in the Western world tend to think about poverty—as an emergency situation requiring an urgent response. But a comparatively small number of situations of poverty are quite that simple. For many people, their poverty is the result of less cataclysmic problems, such as lack of economic opportunities, lack of community engagement, or even just a lack of insight into what to do to escape long-term poverty. When relief is applied to circumstances where it is not the solution, it can ultimately lead to more long-term problems and hindrances.

Because relief is an urgent response to an urgent need, it’s essential for churches or organizations who want to be able to provide relief to engage in emergency or disaster preparedness, which involves forecasting and being ready for potential crisis situations to work with relief as quickly as possible. This can be done by identifying and securing important financial, material, and human resources for quick deployment when needed.

The next step after relief is the long-term approach of Rehabilitation, which involves working directly with people in material poverty, not for them, to restore their conditions to the level they were at before disaster struck. Once a pre-crisis status has been restored, the process of Development comes into play. This relational, participatory process helps people experiencing material poverty grow beyond their baseline, fostering stewardship over their own lives and goals.

A case study will help illustrate. Say you’re approached on the street by a woman who says she’s in need of food as soon as possible. Naturally, you’d feel compelled to provide for her, and justifiably feel fulfilled and satisfied for doing what you can to help. But, if we skip forward in time, and you see that same woman going to other people in your neighborhood or at your church with the same request over the next few weeks, you might be much more skeptical of her story, and maybe even angry or sad. Your charitable offering given to her didn’t actually do address her underlying needs. In reality, the continuous offerings of relief have led to her situation becoming even more desperate than whatever immediate need prompted her to begin asking strangers for help, as she may feel trapped in a cycle of dependency. Perhaps this is even preventing her from seeking deeper help for the various factors contributing to her situation.

This is where rehabilitation comes into play. Rather than doing things for this woman, it would be best to start doing things with her. This is not a call not to help, but an invitation to take the time to understand her story and more details of her situation, and to move forward together toward stability (and even connecting her with various other organizations that can help with more complex issues like addiction, untreated mental health issues, etc.). When a church or organization begins to take a participatory approach with her in her route to recovery, she gains a better understanding of her circumstances and how to navigate them, with the support of people who are “in her corner” through the journey.

Once a person’s crisis has been stabilized through rehabilitation, this allows for development for both those helped and the helpers, moving them closer to each other and to God. Development is an ongoing, transformative experience that creates a trusting and supportive network for an individual, family, or community to escape material poverty. It’s a long process, but increases the capacity for people in material poverty to work and support themselves, and find restoration in the brokenness they have experienced in the world, bringing glory to God in the process.