What do we mean when we talk about poverty?

We exist to embrace and equip people to live a life beyond AIDS. If you have been around Untold at all over the past few years, you have heard us say this - it's our mission, and it's something we are extremely passionate about. For some clients, a life beyond AIDS means reuniting with their families, for others, it means finding faith for the first time. For others, still, it means finding skills that empower them to provide for themselves and their children. A life beyond AIDS looks slightly different for each of our graduates, but the goal for each of them is a thriving life. 

As a poverty alleviation organization, you might think that an obvious goal for all of our clients would be financial wealth, but we don't believe that economic wealth in itself is the opposite of poverty. The opposite of poverty is holistic flourishing.  

If you have been on a trip to East Africa with Untold, you have most certainly been asked the question "what is poverty?" Of course, the most common definition is a lack of material or economic resources, but that just scratches the surface of the issue. If we define poverty one-dimensionally, the solutions we engineer will inevitably also be one-dimensional. But complex problems require complex solutions. At Untold, we believe that economic poverty is actually a symptom of relational poverty. Healing relational poverty is much more complex than simply gaining wealth-- it's a holistic problem that requires a holistic solution. 

We borrow a great structure to think about relational poverty from our friends at the Chalmers Center. This framework is Biblically rooted and it outlines four key relationships: relationship with God, self, others, and creation. When we look at poverty through this multidimensional lens, we understand that we all experience relational poverty. This then allows us to begin the work of poverty alleviation from a place of shared poverty and not from a place of superiority or authority, and this makes all the difference.  

For the next few weeks, we will be unpacking these relationships, the relational poverty we all experience, and how we can collectively move toward flourishing.