When Good Intentions Go Wrong: America’s ‘Crisis of Dependency’

About 25 years ago, James Whitford and his wife founded a ministry to the poor and homeless in Missouri. Not long after starting the ministry, Whitford felt led by the Lord to see for himself what it was like to be homeless. 

After several conversations with his wife, the couple agreed that Whitford would take a short period of time to live on the streets, and Whitford left his home with nothing but the clothes on his back. 

Whitford found himself sitting on a street corner next to a young homeless man in his 30s named Ralph. Whitford had known Ralph for some time and had ministered to him many times, but now, the two were homeless together. It was well into the day and Whitford was hungry. Ralph pulled out a sandwich and offered Whitford half. 

“And if you put yourself in that position of a homeless person offering his food to you, how do you respond? I didn't say it,” Whitford recalled, “but I remember feeling or thinking, well, ‘No, I'm not going to take your sandwich, Ralph. I'm not going to do that. I can go somewhere if I need to, and you're the ministry, and I'm the minister.’” 

At that moment, Whitford says, he realized he had been “treating Ralph and thousands of other people as objects of my good intentions … rather than subjects who have autonomy, capacity, and agency.” The experience changed Whitford’s perspective on serving the poor, and permanently affected the way he led his ministry, moving from a “handout model to a hand-up model.”

“If we're not engaging people in reciprocity in our charity, we are failing them horribly, doing them a disservice and not really upholding the inherent human dignity that is in every person,” he said. 

Unfortunately, Whitford says many of the government's programs intended to help the poor, and many charity programs, don’t engage the recipients' dignity and have instead created significant harm through creating dependence on programs instead of empowerment. 

Whitford, co-founder and CEO of True Charity, joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to discuss his recently published book, “The Crisis of Dependency: How Our Efforts to Solve Poverty Are Trapping People in It and What We Can Do to Foster Freedom Instead.”

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