This article was first printed in a Willow Creek Association magazine focused on the subject of "innovation."
I’m not generally a “numbers person,” but I keep on my desk a list of percentages that shakes me every time I read it. Did you know that …
- Seventy percent of the world’s extremely poor are women
- Almost 80 percent of all refugees are women and their kids
- Every year, as many as four million women and children are sold for the sex trade or to work as slaves
Here’s another bit of information that shakes me: Prior to the 20th century, 90 percent of the casualties of war were soldiers. That soldiers die in war is tragic, but in the last century “collateral damage” has turned tragedy into insanity. Now, worldwide, approximately 90 percent of the casualties of war are civilians and an estimated 75 percent of them are women and children.
And consider this all-too-common scenario in the developing world. An unfaithful husband infects his wife with HIV. The husband runs off and the young mother becomes sick with AIDS. While her sons continue going to school, her daughters stay home to care for her and cook and clean for the family. When the mother dies, her property is taken over by her male relatives, and her children are taken in by some woman — often a grandmother so poor she can’t provide even the necessities for her grandkids. Many such orphaned girls, uneducated and desperate, become prey for sugar daddies who promise food or education in exchange for sex. Tragically, many of these girls become infected with HIV and the cycle continues. This helps explain another sad statistic: that worldwide, 60 percent of those infected with HIV are women.
I have been shocked to discover how many of the world’s tragedies and injustices disproportionately impact women and girls. Overall, women and girls are the least valued, least fed, least educated, and least protected people group in the world.
Now, what do these facts have to do with the subject of innovation?
Let me answer with a true story. A young mother in my church receives a letter from an organization caring for AIDS orphans in the country of Zambia. She reads the letter to her grade school son and daughter and the kids decide they want to raise money for the orphans. But what can they do? Their mom comes up with the idea of having a used toy sale and she helps her kids organize it. All the children in the neighborhood drop their gently used toys in her garage and help put up “Toy Sale” signs throughout the community. On the appointed day, kids buy each other’s toys, parents buy toys, strangers who saw the signs buy toys. At the end of the day the kids have raised $1,300 for orphans. The next year they have another sale and raise even more.
Here’s another story. The women’s fellowship at a very poor church in Nigeria has an active membership of about 175 women. In the church there are 90 widows. So the women’s fellowship starts a “widow’s bucket” project. Every time a woman prepares the main meal of the day, she measures out what her family would normally use, then removes a handful of the main ingredient like rice, beans, or corn and puts it in her “widow’s bucket.” Her family will not even notice that there is less food because so little is taken out. But at the end of the month she has a full bucket of grain to contribute to the widows committee at the church.
And here’s a story I love. A commercial real estate agent I know began volunteering for an organization that helps African refugees resettle in the Chicago area. As my friend became acquainted with many Muslim families from Somalia, she discovered how hard it was for the children to succeed in school because they had to make so many adjustments in such a short time. Many of the kids had never before seen toilets or electric lights or bathtubs. How could they be expected to do homework? So my friend retooled her work schedule so she could work a four-day week and devoted her free time to starting a summer school program to help these kids catch up in school. Staffed with volunteers, the school has transformed the experience of hundreds of children — and their families.
Each of these stories is about a woman who looked at the pain of the world and said, “God, how can I be your hands and feet in this situation? How can I meet this need that breaks your heart?” Then they pondered, got creative, came up with a plan, and took action. We tend to think of innovation in big terms, organizational terms, top-down terms. But I believe these women are great innovators — grassroots innovators.
These are women who know they are loved by God and want to share that love, they know who they are and what they have to offer, and they don’t let fear hold them back. Then they radically engage with the needs of the world and they make a difference. I call them “dangerous women,” women who “strike fear into all that is evil and unjust in the world.”
While it is true that, globally, women are disproportionately victimized, I am seeing another side to the story: that women are becoming disproportionately engaged on the solution side — speaking up and working on behalf of those in need worldwide.
Proverbs 31:8-9 says, “Speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves, for the rights of all who are destitute. Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy.” I’m seeing hundreds of women speaking up — through their words and through their actions.
I keep a file of dangerous women I read about in magazines or the newspaper. What they do inspires me to keep thinking creatively. Consider these stories:
- With welfare reform legislation pending, a social worker in Denver realized that many recipients of public aid would lose all aid unless they found jobs within two years. But most of them lacked skills that would allow them to move successfully from welfare to work. She reasoned that the food industry was one area where people with limited skills could find work and then move up gradually as skills increase. Working with a local restaurant owner and female chef, she designed a 16-week, hands-on course that covers everything from knife skills, food preparation, and restaurant service to punching a time clock and kitchen sanitation. After completing the course, women are placed in jobs that provide benefits, medical coverage, and a living wage. Ninety-five percent of the graduates have stayed off welfare by retaining jobs for more than a year. How cool is that?
- While on vacation, a 30-year-old woman read an article about the plight of women in the Congo. When she returned home she tried to rally her friends to sponsor job training for these women, but nobody listened. She decided she had to do something to get her friends’ attention. Despite the fact that she was clearly not an athlete, she began training for a 30-mile trail run in Portland. Her goal was to raise enough money to sponsor one woman for each mile she ran, but she raised three times that much! The following year she organized similar events in Ireland, Berlin, London and all across the US, raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for Congolese women.
- A woman who loves to throw parties hosted a Christmas party where every guest brought an elegant appetizer and a check for $35 written to a pre-selected local charity. The idea caught on and started a national movement that has fostered circles of community while raising thousands of dollars for local needs.
- The Red Glove Riders, a group of female motorcycle riders, ministers to incarcerated teenage girls. Driving their motorcycles into the gymnasium in a prison youth center, the Riders let the girls sit on their bikes and try on “their leather.” The teens are intrigued that women could be Christians and still have a “cool factor.” The Red Glove Riders are also using their Friday night meetings to learn about HIV/AIDS, and hope to raise funds for orphaned or infected children.
These people did not make a radical career shift or take a 180 degree turn in life. They simply figured out how they could use what they were good at or loved to do to make this world a better place. They lived out Frederick Buechner’s definition of true vocation: “… where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.”
What stops many people from thinking innovatively about the world’s needs is that they get overwhelmed. I understand that. My response when I first visited Africa was a sense of hopelessness. I wondered how I could possibly do anything to make a difference. For you, there may be some other need, some other calling that overwhelms you.
But dangerous women — and grassroots innovators of every kind — don’t give in to hopelessness. They know that every positive action matters, however big or small. Above my desk is a quote I read everyday: “I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do.” (Former U.S. Senate Chaplain, Edward Everett Hale)
I am convinced that women are the greatest untapped resource in the world. We have gifts, talents, skills, education. In many cases we have financial resources that women didn’t even dream of in the past. And beyond all this, we have the tremendous power of compassion.
My passion is to mobilize women on behalf of other women. That may mean responding to the loneliness or grief of the woman next door, or providing food and medicine for women halfway across the world. It may mean offering 40 hours a week for a cause, or scattered hours here and there. But whenever we let God break our hearts with the brokenness of the world, make the fullness of who we are available, and think and pray creatively … then God can make us an innovative and dangerous woman!
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