A Discussion with Douglas Bassett, International Program Development Executive Director, Compassion International
With: Douglas Bassett Berkley Center Profile
April 2, 2007
What brought you personally to the organization?
As a university student and a relatively recent convert to Christianity, I was committed to the importance of Christian witness. That resulted in participation in cross-cultural ministry, both domestic and international. In 1983 I participated in a short-term relief project in Honduras working in a rural community with victims of a severe tropical storm. That experience was pivotal in developing a commitment to not simply Christian witness, but an understanding that my faith required me to embrace a commitment to issues of social justice and addressing human need in all its dimensions. These commitments eventually led me to work with World Relief in Central America in the 1980s. After being with World Relief for ten years, I joined Compassion because of its commitment to holistic ministry and its strategy to seek to do so through local churches.
What are the issues you would most like to see addressed in the Berkley Luce FBO project?
I would find it interesting to have a dialogue in which we seek to understand different perspectives on the role of faith-based organizations and different faith traditions but not one in which we do so based on a foundation of denying differences or asking a commitment to relativism. Many of us who are from traditions that are more theologically conservative are open to respectful dialogue but not one that is premised on denying basic beliefs about our faith. Dialogue can easily feel pre pre-conditioned on having to deny a belief that there are universal religious truths. We are not willing to compromise on this but it does not mean that we can't find civil means to listen to each other and our differences, and to discuss critical issues.
How has faith been part of the vision and evolution of your institution?
Compassion was founded by Evangelist Everett Swanson, who saw the needs of orphans in Korea in the early 1950s and sought ways to respond. The work of our organization expanded by collaborating with Protestant missionaries of varying denominations, who identified children who needed assistance. Eventually, we began to open country offices and at that point established relationships with national denominations and local churches, and defined an increasingly formal program with children. Today our work is almost exclusively carried out through 3,800 local churches and our commitment to work with local churches is rooted in our understanding from the Bible of the critical role given to the Church of holistically addressing human need.
What would you describe as the “faith element” in its work? Can you identify ways in which the approach, ethos, and tangible work might differ from a non-faith-inspired NGO like CARE or Save the Children?
The faith element of what we do is reflected in our purpose, our understanding of the nature of the problem of poverty, and the strategies with which we seek to address poverty. Our purpose or mission is rooted in both the Biblical commands of Christ to make disciples and to love our neighbor. The story of the Good Samaritan reminds us that all are our neighbors and of great value, and worthy of help whether or not they are like us. Secondly, our understanding of the nature of poverty results in a commitment to holism, which for us means development of the person in the physical, socio-emotional, cognitive and spiritual realms. The spiritual area is what most clearly differentiates us from secular organizations and other faith traditions. We embrace a Christian worldview which gives great and equal value to every person, as all are created in God's image, but also recognizes the universal nature of our failure to meet God's expectations and therefore of our need of God's grace through the redemptive work of Christ. While we believe this, we also firmly believe that no coercion should ever be exerted over others but that we should simply faithfully share our faith with others and value them equally regardless of their response to it. Finally, our strategies are informed by our faith. We are committed to working with the local church around the world as we believe it was instituted by Christ and has this holistic ministry.
How does the U.S. dimension of your organization relate to its international role and profile?
As a faith-based organization, we believe that we are part of a worldwide Christian faith community. That gives a deep and natural tie to people all over the world with whom we share a profound bond. This has led us to an alliance of 10 donor countries. In spite of the deep identification with each other, we continue to need to learn how to collaborate with each other and to work on better defining governance approaches. This has been challenged by the fact that the U.S. donor country comprises the majority of the funding. In spite of that, we have recently identified new ways to bring other donor countries into critical governance structures of the broader organization through board and executive leadership structures.
As regards the places in which we have ministry with children, we naturally believe that our movement is global and therefore we place a premium on reflecting that by hiring local staff. While we are a large nonprofit organization, we currently have only one North American or European expatriate assigned in any of our field countries due to this commitment to local staff. That said, we see the need to become increasingly more diverse in our international headquarters and to find ways for people from non-North American and non-European perspectives and backgrounds to be more and more influential in the broader organization. An ongoing restructuring of our executive team and Board of Directors has been carried out in order to bring in more non-North American leadership to the organization. We are making significant strides though we are not yet satisfied.
Has the faith relationship and inspiration of the organization changed over time or would you see it as a stable element?
Over time our inspiration has remained very consistent, but what we do has become better defined. We had a concern from the beginning of providing charity and Christian witness but that has evolved into a commitment to what we call a Holistic Child Development Model. The model is more reflective of intentional, long-term programming as well as what we have learned in the aspects of physical, spiritual, socio-emotional and cognitive development. Our staff around the world deeply identifies with our Mission.
While our inspiration has been constant, the ongoing commitment to it has had to be maintained in the context for the need for increasing professionalism and the management of an organization that has become large and broad in scope. We recruit rigorously for professionals who are committed to our Mission and we work hard to maintain that vision. We consider the shared vision to be a key organizational strength.
What do you see as the path of evolution of FBOs in the U.S.? More generally?
I cannot speak for other faith traditions but three trends stand out in the Evangelical Protestant environment. The first is an ever-increasing desire to form strategic alliances between FBOs instead of seeking to be all things to all people. There is recognition of the need for others who have specialized strengths yet a similar vision. A second trend is the need to engage with local churches in the United States. Churches increasingly come to organizations desiring to partner with them and not only provide financial donations. This includes a desire to find ways to engage volunteers in short-term activities overseas, work with them expanding the vision of their church, and recognize that they have an active role to play. A third trend is that organizations are frequently and easily bypassed by supporters who can establish their own direct relationship to far flung places given the ease of transportation and communications.
What are major generic issues facing FBOs? Limits on proselytization? Accountability? Relations with secular organizations? How have these affected you?
We are not experiencing significant issues regarding the ability of our local church partners to share their Christian faith in field countries though we are concerned by signs in the broader international development community. We are not members of Interaction yet we are aware of some of the internal work that it has done on guidelines related to this. This causes some concern for us as well as for other Evangelical Protestant organizations who believe there should be freedom to share our faith and that, largely, this is done by most organizations in a manner that is culturally sensitive and not coercive. For those of us who work with grass-roots organizations around the world who themselves want to share their faith, we find the desire to place such restrictions on people working within their own culture to be inappropriate.
There are four other generic issues that come to mind that the broader range of FBOs in my particular faith tradition are facing. The first issue is what is distinct between us and our secular counterparts. In many cases, FBOs compete for the same funding from government or foundations as secular NGOs. The requirements of that funding can leave them with a program that is remarkably similar to that of secular NGOs. A second issue is what is appropriate collaboration with government and secular organizations, and other faith traditions. Many Evangelical Protestants have concerns that collaboration with government and other traditions may compromise Christian witness. A third issue is that of openness. Evangelicals are committed to integrity yet, like other people, it is not necessarily easy for us to be open about the difference between our aspirations and our actual achievements in our programs. We need to be self-critical and open to constructive criticism from others if we are to become more effective for those that we serve. This is especially true where organizations have private funding that doesn't necessarily come with external evaluation requirements such as those with some government and foundation grants. A final issue is about what is appropriate to do in collaboration with the church and what is best not to do with the church. There are varying opinions on this between practitioners and there probably needs to be a greater understanding of the role of the church so that we neither go to the extremes of ignoring it nor improperly using it in our development efforts in ways that lead it away from its basic mission.
What kinds of funding issues arise for your organization, especially insofar as its faith links are concerned?
Our organization has had a steady, growing and reliable funding stream that addresses most of our programmatic needs. We have a clear message with our financial supporters that tightly aligns with what we do in the field and we have had significant flexibility in adapting our program towards what is most effective. We recognize that we have been in a very fortunate situation. We do not accept any government funding. We have debated whether or not we should do so and have decided that we shouldn't as we are concerned that it would place some restrictions on our holistic mission and work with the church.
What issues might arise on operational processes that are in some sense specific to FBOs? (For example criteria for hiring, procurement, limits on types of interventions.)
We hire people that are committed to our mission. Hiring has not been a major issue for us in most positions and we have staff all over the world who deeply identify with our mission. A practical operational issue for us is that we partner with 56 denominations around the world from Anglicans to Pentecostals. Increasingly, our approach involves encouraging those partner churches to collaborate with each other. While our general experience is that this has served to build bridges and unity between them, it requires us to work in a way that is sensitive to their differences and their distinct approaches to governance. The latter impacts how oversight committees are formed, to what extent there will be other sources of direction and accountability, and how they respond to some of the programmatic curriculum that we provide.
A final issue is how we manage the relationship between our supporters in a donor country and the local church and children in the field country where we work. We encourage their relationship through letters and visits yet we also need to set some boundaries. Most of these are for reasons of what we understand is developmentally best for the church and children. Other reasons are for issues of child protection. It is not always easy to have encouraged such identification and then to put boundaries on it yet we feel we need to work for the right balance in this.
What are the central challenges for your organization as you look to the future (not with specific relation to faith)?
As we look at our program our first challenge is how to be more focused on outcomes and effective in measuring impact. This is an extraordinarily complex commitment to implement around the world. A second challenge is to increase the quality of our partnership with local churches while also ensuring accountability for results and legitimate donor expectations. Thirdly, we face the challenge of high growth. We have ever more opportunity due to new supporters yet we want to make sure that the growth is accompanied by quality program on an ever broader scale. A final challenge is how to become more international in our headquarters staffing and find ways that the knowledge and insights of staff around the world influence the directions of the organization.
How does the organization interact with major secular development organizations?
We have more contact with secular organizations at the field level than we do in the United States. That stems partly out of an identity that is a mix of a mission (but one that does not send missionaries) and of a Non-Governmental Organization. We therefore haven't historically aligned with secular approaches to relief and development or sometimes even with those approaches in other Christian NGOs. At the field level, there is much more interaction and coordination with other organizations as the on-the-ground implementation brings them into contact with each other. We are open to engagement with secular organizations in certain areas but intentionally focused in the engagement.
How does your FBO approach collaboration with FBOs from other faith traditions in the U.S. and overseas?
We have not pursued such relationships. Our supporters and partner churches have differing positions on what is appropriate or inappropriate and we have made a choice of not establishing such relationships as an organization. Of equal importance, since the partner churches are the ones implementing activities, those choices are left to them based on their own denominational tradition. It's very important to us to work in a way that affirms our sense of Christian mission and that can make such collaboration difficult.
What are the major challenges of partnering with local FBOs in the field? Compare/contrast dealing with NGOs, CBOs, umbrella groups, individual congregations.
As an international organization, we are deeply committed to working through partnership and not being directly operational in most programmatic activities and we do so with 3,800 individual congregations. We see tremendous advantages of partnering with local churches that are a part of the local community and therefore have made it central to our approach. That said, there is also a need to help them build their capacity to implement a program, respond to accountability expectations associated with the program, and broaden the vision within their congregations so that it does not reside in simply a few individuals.
We also have a positive experience working with like-minded local NGOs. They can bring competencies and carry out complementary activities that a local church may never have the capacity to do or which may be outside of its mission. We therefore encourage such collaborative relationships. An occasional disadvantage that can exist in NGOs is they can tend to place a premium on their own professionalism over volunteerism and unintentionally undermine local initiative as they professionalize what churches were doing with volunteerism and their own vision. Sometimes there can also be a bit of a condescending and critical attitude towards the local church and its ability. Too often professionals focus purely on the technical and miss the vital issues of ownership, sustained commitment and individual human caring and compassion which a church can bring and which are vital in long-term development at the local level.
Which emerging issues could really benefit from religious/secular partnership? (i.e. the “new” trafficking, Darfur, debt relief, etc.)
The ideological range of FBOs is broad and, in theory, for almost any issue there is some FBO that can partner with secular organizations. Such partnerships seem to often be at a macro, advocacy level, but not always grass-roots in nature. An interesting and challenging question to me is to identify where such partnerships can happen at the grass-roots level. Congregations exist within the community and can address issues from within it. They are more comfortable and intentional in speaking to moral issues and have the credibility with their followers to be heard. The issue of child protection is one that is well-addressed from such a grass-roots perspective given the pervasive nature of child abuse and the place of churches which see themselves as needing to uphold moral principles.
What is one major misconception about FBOs in development work? Does it matter?
International secular NGOs sometimes have a deep suspicion of FBOs that have a religiously-based mission. The assumption seems to be that assistance is a means to the end of conversion. While attesting to their faith is vital to many FBOs, the great majority also believe that all people are equally deserving of assistance, regardless of creed, and that there can be no coercion or manipulation of aid for the sake of conversion. In fact, most would believe that to be a violation of Biblical principles and believe that conversion must be a choice. In our case, the church exists with the community and it usually quite attuned and sensitive to the issues. On the ground, we rarely have issues with other faith traditions and, in fact, have tremendous demand from people from other traditions to participate in the programs. It seems that some international secular organizations consider this to be far more of an issue than we have experienced with those other faith traditions in actual practice.
How do you see experience in the U.S. in comparison to FBO work in other parts of the world?
I believe that there is more tension over the role of FBOs in some sectors here in the U.S. than in most of the places where we work in the Two-Thirds world. On the ground, people are looking for help and the issues are not theoretical but of day-to-day survival. They see what organizations are doing, can judge motives and effectiveness, and are a quick to accept those whom they believe are acting in the best interest of the populations they serve, even if they are from a different faith tradition.