Associated Baptist Press
February 6, 2009 · (09-17)
David Wilkinson, Executive Director
Robert Marus, Managing Editor/Washington Bureau Chief
Bob Allen, Senior Writer
In this issue
Christian social entrepreneurs measure success by different yardstick (865 words)
Human trafficking is all too real, filmmaker discovers (680 words)
Environmental damage hurts children and elderly most (341 words)
Predatory gambling preys on weakness for profit, activist insists (414 words)
Christian social entrepreneurs measure success by a different yardstick
By Ken Camp (865 words)
HONG KONG (ABP) -- A growing number of Christian businesspeople -- who see entrepreneurial ventures as missional opportunities -- believe doing good and doing well don't have to be mutually exclusive.
These Christian social entrepreneurs are committed to using their business skills to organize, create, manage and monetize a venture to improve society in a holistic way -- doing what they call "kingdom work."
"A motivating factor for me was that I was involved in bringing together a team in the United Kingdom to create a campaign to address the demand side of human trafficking called 'The Truth Isn't Sexy,'" said Shannon Hopkins, co-founder of Sweet Notions, a business in England that sells used fashion accessories donated by individuals and stores around the world.
"We were very successful impacting both government and the culture. But finding seed money for innovative new ventures is very hard. So, that is the kind of work Sweet Notions wants to support -- seed money primarily for new work that can be leveraged to bring big change."
About 10 years ago, Hopkins served on the team that helped start Soul Café, a postmodern Christian community in Kerrville, Texas. Later, she worked in student ministry at Schreiner University in Kerrville and as a consultant with the Baptist General Convention of Texas.
Hopkins and business partner Jessica Stricker launched Sweet Notions last year out of a "desire to see both personal and community transformation," she said.
"Our faith has been a motivating factor in starting Sweet Notions. But along with faith, there is actually a recognition that social enterprise offers a unique opportunity for kingdom work today," Hopkins said.
"We are measuring our impact on a quadruple bottom line -- measuring our success not only through the economic capital we create, but also measuring the environmental, social and spiritual capital that is generated through Sweet Notions."
For Sam Say, a Baptist layman in Hong Kong, the starting point in launching a social-venture enterprise was asking how to "capture kingdom dollars for kingdom purposes." In his case, the answer was simple. Christians buy coffee. His plan focused on developing a way they could buy a product they already planned to purchase from a provider who could help poor farmers in his native Laos improve their lives.
Less than two years ago, he launched Bolaven Farms -- an organic coffee farm that markets its product to churches and individuals in the United States who subscribe to the service. Subscribers receive two half-pound bags every month.
The farm is located on 410 acres of fertile land on the Bolaven Plateau of southern Laos, bordered by mountain streams on the north and southwest. About 100 acres are devoted to grasses and legumes to restore nitrogen to the soil and provide fodder for livestock. The remainder is devoted to coffee growing.
Bolaven-grown coffee beans are hand-sorted to ensure quality before they are roasted, packaged and shipped.
Bolaven Farms is "a for-profit business with the mandate to act justly, to love kindness and to walk humbly with God," Say explained.
He also has created a companion non-profit organization -- Just Grounds -- that relates directly to churches and recruits short-term missions volunteers and prayer partners.
"We want people not just to buy our coffee but to adopt Laos and to commit to praying that God will do amazing things there," he said.
Say hopes Just Grounds can directly benefit sustainable community development through loans, village school construction, scholarships, mobile clinics and water purification projects.
About 110 people -- 80 adults and their children -- participate in Bolaven Farms' resident program that allows landless families to work on a demonstration farm for two years. Graduates of the program can qualify for matching loans to establish their own small-scale family farms.
A non-resident program at Bolaven Farms offers short-term training for farmers who already work their own land but need to learn additional skills to maximize crop production in a sustainable way.
Christian social entrepreneurs who launch legitimate businesses with missional objectives are qualitatively different than missionaries who use business as a "cover" to enter countries closed to traditional missions outreach, said Bill Tinsley, leader of WorldconneX, the missions network launched by the Baptist General Convention of Texas.
"In recent years, Christian missionaries attempted to enter closed countries posing as legitimate businesses while, in fact, having no business expertise or interest. This has proven to be unfortunate in most cases and counterproductive to the gospel. Honesty and integrity cannot be discarded, even when the ends seem to justify the means by giving Christians a foothold in a hostile country," Tinsley wrote in Finding God's Vision: Missions and the New Realities.
In contrast, many countries "offer an open door" to Christians who have entrepreneurial ability and genuine skills to create successful businesses that benefit society, he noted.
"This may be the most revolutionary missions development in the 21st century," Tinsley wrote. "Professional, fully funded missionaries are still needed and will still be sent by existing denominational and parachurch mission boards and agencies. They might even add to their numbers. But the missions impact of entrepreneurial Christians who capitalize on the global economy and the new realities could be exponential by comparison."
Ken Camp is managing editor of the Texas Baptist Standard.
Human trafficking is all too real, filmmaker discovers
By John Hall (680 words)
AUSTIN, Texas (ABP) -- A few years ago, Justin Dillon read an article in the New York Times Magazine that detailed the story of young Indian girls who were searching for a better life in the United States but ended up in prostitution. Along the way, they were robbed, sold into slavery, beaten and repeatedly raped.
The atrocities were unfathomable to Dillon, a San Francisco musician. Like other horrifying events such as the genocide in Darfur and the Holocaust, he had no mental framework through which he could comprehend what was taking place via something called "human trafficking." More than 12 million people were affected by it -- a number so large he found it unimaginable.
Until he met one of the people affected by it.
Shortly after reading the article, Dillon and his band played a small town near the Black Sea. The crowds were raucous and energetic, treating Dillon and his bandmates like they were the Beatles. After the show, he met one of his new fans, a teenage girl who believed she had paid someone to make travel arrangements for her to go to the United States.
But her story didn't add up. She believed she was going to America for a more comfortable lifestyle -- working in a fast-food restaurant. Remembering the Times article, Dillon dug deeper, asking the girl to show him the paperwork for her travel arrangements.
She had none. Dillon sat her down and explained to her that she was being swindled and most likely would become a victim of human trafficking. He told her that she likely would be sold, beaten and raped, never living the life she thought she was a plane ride from.
The toughest part wasn't explaining what most likely was this girl's fate, Dillon said. It was watching her decide to take the chance anyway.
"They're blinded by their desire for something better," he said during a session of the Texas Baptist Christian Life Commission's annual meeting in Austin.
Shaken by his first contact with human trafficking, Dillon was determined to do something. He gathered a few of his musician friends and started putting together a concert to fight human trafficking, but couldn't get everyone together for one date.
Eventually the project morphed from a concert to a documentary that would take him across the country and overseas. Last year Call and Release, a musical film about human trafficking, was released in an effort to raise awareness about the issue. He has been touring with the movie ever since, including a showing during the CLC conference.
Human trafficking is a global issue, but is particularly important in Texas, where 20 percent of U.S. human trafficking occurs, according to Texas state Sen. Leticia Van de Putte (D-San Antonio). The I-10 corridor has been designated as the busiest human-trafficking passage in the nation.
About 80 percent of human-trafficking victims are female, and roughly 50 percent of victims are children. Traffickers work in organized underground syndicates, moving women from location to location on at least a monthly basis.
Victims run the gamut of ethnicities and are in a variety of jobs, but many of them end up in sexually oriented businesses, said Texas Rep. Rafael Anchia (D-Dallas). Because of that, Anchia helped craft legislation that helped Dallas law- enforcement officers crack down on exotic dancing clubs and massage parlors, uncovering groups of girls who had been trafficked.
Anchia and Van de Putte are attempting to round out legislation mandating training for law-enforcement officers to recognize and stop human trafficking. They're also working on systems to track human trafficking and allow a way to hold traffickers accountable in civil court.
"Our fight to end human trafficking will be long and arduous," Van de Putte said.
Eric Nichols, a deputy state attorney general, said that fight will require the help of the public and public organizations such as churches. Texans serve as the eyes and ears for law enforcement officials, he said.
"This is an issue where your organization and your churches, if you have the enthusiasm, can make a difference," he said.
John Hall is news director for the Baptist General Convention of Texas.
Environmental damage hurts children and elderly most
By Ken Camp (341 words)
AUSTIN, Texas (ABP) -- Environmental degradation presents the greatest danger to the most vulnerable people --particularly children and the elderly, a Houston pediatrician recently told the Texas Baptist Christian Life Commission's annual conference.
Scientists have reached consensus about the reality of global warming, and children especially will bear the brunt of its effects, said Susan Pacheco, a faculty member of the pediatrics department at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston.
Pacheco, who treats children who suffers from allergies and immune-deficiency disorders at the school's clinic, noted children are more vulnerable than the general population to heat stress, air pollution, water-borne diseases and extreme weather events.
Heat-related deaths take a particularly heavy toll on the elderly population, while children especially suffer ill effects from air pollution, she said.
"Children are more susceptible to harm from ozone air pollution," she said, due in part to the time they spend outdoors and in part because of their increased breathing rate relative to their body size.
"Asthma is the most common chronic disease among children," she said, adding that airborne irritants linked to vehicle traffic and other pollutants increase the risk. Also, as the overall global temperature has increased, it has resulted in a dramatic increase in pollen production, she explained.
Global warming already has begun to present greater risk to population centers in coastal areas, which tend to have a high percentage of the poor, the elderly and the very young, she said.
"The intensity of hurricanes is going to increase significantly. That's a no-brainer," Pacheco said. "It is primarily due to the increase in sea temperatures."
That, in turn, presents greater risk of flooding and resultant diseases that are water-borne or spread by insects.
As a resident of a coastal city, Pacheco noted she and her family have learned how to secure their home against the elements and cope with the inconvenience of occasional power outages. But for the chronically poor in developing countries, those options are not available, she observed.
"We are people in a privileged position," she said.
Ken Camp is managing editor of the Texas Baptist Standard.
Predatory gambling preys on weakness for profit, activist insists
By Ken Camp (414 words)
AUSTIN, Texas (ABP) -- Public revulsion over recent abuses in the financial sector could give new impetus to efforts to outlaw the most pernicious forms of gambling, an anti-gambling activist recently told the Texas Baptist Christian Life Commission's annual conference.
"The state lottery is government's version of sub-prime lending," said Les Bernal, executive director of StopPredatoryGambling.org.
If the general public recognized the realities surrounding state-run lotteries and casino gambling, people would view them in the same light as predatory lenders, he insisted.
"We need to change the public perception. We're talking about predatory gambling -- using gambling to prey on human weakness for profit," Bernal said.
Instant-win scratch-off lottery tickets and casino gambling differ from small-stakes social gambling in several respects, he observed -- the speed of the games and the "buzz" people get; the amount of money people lose; and the predatory marketing that is used to promote them.
The Federal Trade Commission exempts state lotteries from the same standards to which other advertisers must comply, he noted.
"We should ask why, during severe economic times, is the government trying to convince citizens to spend large sums of money on virtually worthless tickets instead of encouraging savings," Bernal said.
But unfortunately, the ads work, he added.
"One out of five Americans thinks the best way to achieve long-term financial security is to play the lottery," he said.
Lotteries could not even come close to breaking even if they relied on sales to casual buyers, he added. Five percent of the ticket buyers account for more than half of all ticket sales.
Instant-win lottery tickets trigger the same brain chemistry as the bells and whistles of a casino slot machine, said Rob Kohler, who worked 12 years with the Texas Lottery Commission before he joined the anti-gambling movement.
"It's instant gratification -- the same appeal for scratch-off lottery tickets and for slot machines," he said.
In recent decades, state-run lotteries have helped transform the United States from a nation of small savers into a national of small wasters, said David Blankenhorn, founding president of the Institute for American Values.
"Lotteries take direct and intentional aim at the thrift ethic," he said.
Blankenhorn believes government could help reverse that trend by "repurposing the lottery." He envisions using the existing lottery infrastructure to encourage savings.
"Every time a person went to buy a lottery ticket, they also would have a chance to buy a savings ticket," he said. "And the slogan could be, 'Every ticket wins.'"
Ken Camp is managing editor of the Texas Baptist Standard.
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