The Chalmers Center does not directly implement anything. Rather, we train churches (and missionaries) to implement holistic, economic development ministries in their communities. Hence, your donation to the Chalmers Center is immediately leveraged by the human and financial resources of churches and missionaries around the world!

For example, Chalmers trained one individual who then trained a denomination in Kenya to minister to the needs of the poor in their churches and communities. As documented in a published journal article,¹ this project is going so well that is will likely exceed its five-year goal of reaching 20,000 households! As one donor put it, “Because Chalmers’ model is so heavily externally leveraged, they have accomplished, and continue to accomplish, loaves-and-fishes levels of return." You can learn more about this in the article "Proverbs 31 Women in Tribal Dress" found in Issue #1 of the 2007 edition of Mandate e-newsletter.

In addition, Chalmers achieves a highly-leveraged impact because we  intentionally design our strategies to be simple and highly replicable, even by grassroots churches in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. For example, one of Chalmers’ premier strategies is to help churches to help the poor to own and operate their own savings and credit associations. You may have heard of the microfinance/microenterprise development movement started by Muhammed Yunus, the Nobel Laureate who formed the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh. Grameen’s model, which has been replicated all over the world, raises outside capital from donors or investors and then lends this capital to very poor people. In contrast, Chalmers’ approach to microfinance uses the savings of the poor as capital, meaning that our savings and credit groups can be formed in even the remotest parts of the world without having to wait for donor funds or large-scale programs. In fact, the poor are able to replicate these savings and credit groups on their own!

We observed a dramatic example of this self-replication in a church that was ministering to 50 HIV/AIDs sufferers in a slum in Kenya. Chalmers trained this church, along with many others, at one of our week-long, Christian Economic Development Institutes. The church took this training and helped these HIV/AIDS sufferers to form a savings and credit association. The members contributed their own savings and lent the accumulated money out to one another. Many businesses were started, and the members were restored to a sense of dignity and worth. The group meetings included Bible study and prayer, and people learned that they were loved and valued by God. These 50 individuals then used the savings and credit association methodology to minister to their own friends and relatives, helping them to form savings and credit associations that included Bible study and prayer. The end result is that 50 HIV/AIDS sufferers, the modern day equivalent of lepers in Kenya, were empowered to minister holistically to approximately 1,000 others! That is leveraging!! Read more about this in the article "God Has Chosen the Foolish and the Despised Things" found in Issue #1 of the 2007 edition of our Mandate e-newsletter.

¹ Roy Mersland, “Innovations in Savings and Credit Groups: Evidence from Kenya,” Small Enterprise Development, vol. 18, no. 1, March 2007, pp. 50-56.