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Making Way for Sustainable Impact

“If I die BASE jumping,” Bryan Swick Turner wrote in a letter addressed to his closest friends, “Please, and I cannot emphasize this enough, do everything you can to help end extreme poverty by 2030 and do your utmost to achieve sustainable development beyond that. Don’t waste time being upset about my dying; be upset about the seven million kids that die every year and don’t even get a chance to live…”

The Columbia University graduate was only 32-years-old when tragedy struck. Bryan, who died on March 9, 2015 while BASE jumping in Idaho, spent his life supporting anti-poverty efforts. In those 32 years, he achieved great things: leading the largest student movement to end extreme poverty in North America and holding prominent positions at the U.N. and Columbia University Earth Institute. His accomplishments don’t stop there.

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Bryan has been described as “a one-man army saving lives in the most significant way.” Even after his jarring death, he has served as a catalyst for change. His family, friends and the development community have created the Bryan Swick Turner Memorial fund to strengthen the development of a new field – Behavioral Science of Sustainable Development. The fund is set to launch on April 11, 2015 with an initial donation of $20,000. The program will be based at Columbia University, which will sponsor a fellowship, course and summer fieldwork opportunities in honor of Bryan.

Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s book A Path Appears opens with the story of the big-hearted Rachel Beckwith who, like Bryan, moved us to act. On Rachel’s ninth birthday, she asked that instead of birthday presents, guests donate to an organization called charity: water that drills wells in impoverished villages around the world. Her fundraising goal: $300. Rachel didn’t meet her goal at her birthday, but after a tragic car accident took the altruistic 9-year-old’s life, donations for charity: water came flooding in, reaching up to $1,265,823. By requesting donations instead of birthday gifts, Rachel laid out a foundation for change.

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“First, never underestimate the power of inertia,” writes Richard H. Thaler in his book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness. “Second, that power can be harnessed.” Thaler proposes that simple changes to common policies, like making organ donations opt out rather than opt in, can have large effects on the behavior of individuals. Rachel could have asked for a birthday present, but instead she made donations the new status quo.

A follower of Thaler’s theories, Bryan believed poverty-alleviating efforts could be much more effective by applying insights from the behavioral sciences – making giving the norm, not the exception. Books such as Thaler’s Nudge and A Path Appears show that simple and inexpensive changes often have big effects on the behavior of individuals.

Every day we have the ability to make the same kind and charitable decisions that Rachel and Bryan made to make giving back the norm. And the benefits go beyond dollars raised. As Nicholas and Sheryl wrote, “A path is now appearing to show us how to have a positive impact on the world around us. This is a path of hopefulness, but also a path of fulfilment: typically we start off by trying to empower others and end up empowering ourselves too.”

Click here to learn more about Bryan’s initiative to end poverty.

Building Community-Rooted Change

This summer I was driving down a dirt road in Uganda with Canon Gideon, who founded Hope University near Kampla to serve at risk youth and young adults in severe poverty and suffering the effects of HIV/AIDS. We were developing a partnership between women tea farmers in Uganda and the women who work for the social enterprise here called Thistle Farms. I had founded a program almost 20 years before this drive with housing and work for women who have been trafficked, traumatized, locked in closets, beaten, raped, sold, addicted and feeling rootless. We were discussing how to become better advocates for women who have known the underside of bridges, the backside of anger, the inside of prison walls and the short side of justice.

I told Gideon the story of my abuse, and how I decided 18 years ago that I needed to confront my abuser. When I did, I was surprised that the first thing the man who molested me asked was, “Who have you told?” In response, Gideon told me that on his journey when he told the head of the seminary that he was HIV positive in 1988, the first thing his Professor said was, “Don’t tell anyone.”

Canon Gideon with Becca Stevens in Uganda

The documentary A Path Appears, celebrates brave women who dared to speak their truth and helps us discover how our truth can set us free. The truth untangles deep problems and hidden secrets. Then and only then, we find communities committed to housing, recovery, trauma therapy, economic freedom and love without judgment.

Many people who see this documentary will ask how it’s possible that the New York Times reports that more than 100,000 women and girls in the U.S. are at risk for trafficking. More folks will want to know what they can do to help.

Thistle Farms is committed to continuing its efforts to offer education and outreach to assist more cities in creating sister communities. We welcome everyone to our workshops and feed them at the Thistle Stop Café. We want to help be a part of a movement with social media advocates, conscious consumers and new friends in the fight to witness to the truth that love is the most powerful force for social change.

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As Gideon and I drove and talked about the universal issues of sexual violence borne on the individual backs of women all over the globe, we remembered that this work is non-competitive. We need each other to grow our economic leverage, political clout, and clinical insights to make a difference in a culture that still buys and sell women, preys on the most vulnerable, and keeps the secrets of predators.

As we drove down the dirt road, I felt myself washed in a wave of grief at the injustices I’ve seen, and the tenderness I feel towards the mercy of a community that hopes together. We are committed with friends throughout the world to make the social enterprise more successful, to bring in more women from the streets and to make the system more just. We need each other to do this work, which is not issue oriented but rather community rooted, to create systemic change.

 

About the blogger:
 
Becca Stevens is an Episcopal priest and founder of Magdalene, residential communities of women who have survived prostitution, trafficking and addiction. She founded the social enterprise Thistle Farms which currently employs nearly 50 residents and graduates, and houses a natural body care line, a paper and sewing studio, Thistle Stop Café, and its new global initiative, Shared Trade. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, ABC World News, NPR, PBS, CNN, and Huffington Post, and was named as one of 15 Champions of Change for violence against women by the White House in 2011. Stevens has also been inducted into the Tennessee Women’s Hall of Fame, and recently launched her newest book, “The Way of Tea & Justice: Rescuing the World’s Favorite Beverage from its Violent History.”