Chance – hand out or hand up

Sitting here in my chilly Oxford study, I’m caught between two worlds. On the one hand I’m working on an abstract funding bid that could significantly improve the quality of teaching for 1,200 teachers in Rwanda, which in turn would potentially impact tens of thousands of young lives. Yet, I’m distracted because by my elbow is my mobile phone’s working overtime. It’s Chance from Rwanda. Remember Chance? I wrote a blog about him in the summer called Taking A Chance on Chance. (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/taking-chance-trevor-waldock/) A real person at the end of the phone.

Chance made us a cup of coffee with the Emerging Leaders foot

Chance worked at a coffee shop and his dream was to save to get to college. When I saw him in the autumn he was still there, but saving hard. Over Christmas the coffee shop has closed down and Chance is now without a job.

This is what hopelessness looks like - a young man trying hard to climb an impossibly high ‘life’ wall and giving it a good go……. and then suddenly someone adds another 100 metres to the height of the wall.

Worse than that. It’s what hopelessness is increasingly looking like all over the worlds developing countries, not just the 61% of Rwanda’s youth population. India has the highest youth population in the world and young people were told that education was the answer and so they have ‘sold the farm’ and got an education, only to discover….there aren’t enough jobs. The youth are getting frustrated and feeling increasingly desperate…..and we know the results of that.

And I am feeling hopeless as I text back and forth with Chance. I can’t distance myself from the abstractions of big numbers, big issues in far away countries because Chance is in my house right now! What can I do? It’s the question we all face when confronted by the worlds true need.

Teaching leadership in a mountain top school in Rwanda

I asked Chance “how many young, unemployed people could you get together, if we could get someone there to train you?’

“20” he said

“Could you find a venue for free?” I ask.

“The school nearby would give us a room I think” ……“but….” he said “…some of these youth have never even finished school”

“That’s not an issue” I said “as long as they are hungry to learn and motivated to learn to lead themselves out of poverty”

“What about the language problem?” he asked

“No problem; we have everything already translated in Kinyarwandan and we know great translators”

“That’s great news” he said. An echo of hope.

My mind jumped to an ancient story where a man of faith, Peter, was accosted by a man who couldn’t walk….was trapped in his own hopelessness, poverty and begging every day for money.

The story came to mind because people always think it’s about giving money and it isn’t. Chance doesn’t need money. Chance hasn’t ever asked me for money. Chance needs a chance. It’s the chance that often costs the money. It’s the

hand-up to the first rung that costs, not a hand-out.

The story reports that Peter said ‘Silver & Gold I do not have…..but in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth “get up and walk” ‘

I was struck that even this response wasn’t the offer of a financial handout (money – silver or gold), or the offer of religious dependency - the faith ‘offer’ was ‘get up and walk’. An offer to take an action, based on someone’s belief in his potential to take that action.

You can imagine the knee jerk response from the poor guy in the story.

“I cant”

“Why cant you?’

“Because I’ve always been like this; nothing will change for me”

“But I just said…get up and walk…you can do this….’

“No I cant”

That’s what Emerging Leaders call a poverty mindset. Even when the offer of something different is on the table, the mind is still stuck in its poverty thinking.

It is exactly this dynamic that all of Emerging Leaders programmes are addressing and seeing impact – we passed the 50,000 people trained and over 2.5million people impacted this Christmas.

So how much would it actually cost to take a chance on Chance and his friends and other youth-filled communities of the world? The cost of 12- 15 hours of life transforming Leadership for Life training would cost £100