Poverty, Inc. co-producer Mark R. Weber (@markrweber) shares his commitment to discomfort as a necessary function of growth at the Jubilee Professional conference in Pittsburgh, 2016.
Full transcript below:
MARK WEBER
Hello! Yes, I call myself an entrepreneur because it sounds a lot better than self-employed, but that’s really what I am.
I just want to share quickly about my background and journey to this film. When I went to Notre Dame, as a freshman I joined the Notre Dame boxing team. The first day in the gym, I was told the following: “Strong bodies fight that weak bodies may be nourished.” The motto of the Notre Dame boxing team since 1931 has served to motivate a team of now 200 guys raising over $100,000 dollars a year to support Catholic missions in Bangladesh. I had the honor of being a part of this starting my freshman year.
But in all of the 78 years leading up to my junior season when I was named captain and president, no students had ever actually been over to Bangladesh—largely because of war that was happening at the time and distance and travel and risk, frankly. But in 2008, I had the honor of leading the first group over. I was a film student at the time. I also hired a film crew and we began the production of a new documentary to capture the story of this boxing team fighting in the ring but also fighting for something bigger than themselves.
I will never forget the first school in a tribal village we visited. It was an all girls school and they came out with their beautiful cultural songs and their beautiful cultural dances and presented us with flowers and I am crying like a baby. And then our Bengali priest introduces us, saying, “These are the Notre Dame boxers and we owe them a great deal of gratitude for all the support they’ve given us over the years. They have this beautiful motto that’s ‘Strong bodies fight,’ and they are the strong bodies, ‘that weak bodies may be nourished,’ and we are the weak bodies.”
All of a sudden that motto that we had taken so much pride in caused us to sink in our seats. What I realized is that we had turned the poor into the objects of our charity. We had become attached to a cause instead of coming into a relationship with persons. I began to see that this is so prevalent in our consumerist cause-oriented culture. Because not only had a bunch of eighteen- and twenty-year-olds made a mistake like this, but no one in our culture had ever tapped us on the shoulder and corrected it in all those years.
That led me to discovering other people who were grappling with this. And that led me to discover this team that, some of you have found the PovertyCure DVD series? It’s the same team that produced this new film. The PovertyCure DVD series is a faith-based Christian educational curriculum. You can check it out. And then this film, Poverty, Inc., is a mainstream, broad, secular piece, but we are Christian filmmakers, and the anthropological and theological presuppositions that underlie this film are deeply imbedded in our faith.
But it is exciting because now the film is played in over 40 international film festivals, included the Best of Fest at IDFA Amsterdam, which is the biggest documentary festival in the world. It has won $100,000 award from the Templeton Foundation, it’s been endorsed by Michael Moore—of all people—and across the political spectrum.
AUDIENCE
[laughs]
MARK WEBER
I know, right? [laughs] He said, “Once you see it, you will never look at poverty and the third world the same again.” So I hope you have the opportunity to see it tonight. If you don’t, I hope you get on your phones tonight, go to povertyinc.org and you will see the preorder options there on Amazon and iTunes. Those preorders, they don’t just help you see the film, they help the film get uplifted on these platforms so it gets exposure.
I am going to show you a clip tonight and then I am going to talk. When I think about the theme of today, the entrepreneurial spirit, what does it mean to be an entrepreneur? I think what it means for me is to make myself uncomfortable. When we are comfortable, we’re not growing. I am training for a marathon right now, and I am not comfortable. I am literally tearing my muscles every time I train, but that’s how we grow. That’s how we build strength, to tear our muscles and build them stronger.
So today I want to hit on some things that are controversial and difficult to grapple with. We are going to start with this film clip, because at the end of the day it is not about me and my ideas, but it is about meeting people from around the world and then sharing what we learn from coming into relationship with them. So let’s play the clip and then we will talk a little bit more about what else I’ve learned making this film.
I don’t know about you, but I did not know there was a photovoltaic startup in Haiti. When we think Haitian entrepreneurs, we think artisan, we think baskets, we think small little chicken farm; we don’t think high tech solar panel company. That’s part of the mistake that is very similar to the mistake I made in Bangladesh. We interviewed Magatte Wade, a powerful Senegalese woman and powerful voice in the film—you will see her if you see the film—and she said to me when we asked her about microfinance, “I am sick and tired of you putting the poor chicken farmer on the cover of Fortune magazine.”
PARTICIPANT
[applauds]
MARK WEBER
“Africans are doing world-class things.”
AUDIENCE
[applauds]
MARK WEBER
“But that’s not the story you want to tell, is it? That’s not the narrative you want to push. And it doesn’t just affect how Americans view Africans; it affects how Africans view themselves.”
After the film at the Austin Film Festival, a woman from Cameroon came up to us and she said in tears, “Today I am so proud to be an African woman.” She wrote us a two-page reflection on the film about how she realized that she had come to view her own people as a Westerner.
It is very powerful. Just like my story in Bangladesh, the film is trying to bridge this disconnect, because it exists. And that’s why part of being entrepreneurial is being uncomfortable, with looking hard in the mirror. And it’s not a one time, flip of the switch, Now I get it! When we were shooting in Haiti, we were in a tent city and people don’t like seeing white people with cameras in tent cities, because they feel objectified. I had a woman throw a rock in my direction. I had a woman get in my face and yell at me. Then we would take time and explain what we were doing, and then usually when we tell them, “No, we want to flip the narrative, we want to tell a different story,” people would appreciate that.
And yet, in this tent city, my colleague, Anielka, she took this picture of me with this adorable little kid in tattered clothing, and it’s just adorable. So what do I do when I get home? Facebook! Post it online, watch the “Likes” skyrocket. I was reading at the time The Spiritual Danger of Doing Good by Peter Greer. The next day I looked at it and I realized I don’t even know that kid’s name. I am just cashing in on the social capital I get from being an independent film maker in Haiti. So I took it down.
That is what we have to do. We have to grind. We have to hurt. We have to be uncomfortable. It’s not about pointing fingers, because we’ve all been on the wrong side of that fence. But it is about a commitment to growth.
I want to push on a few things that are really close to our hearts, things like orphanages and adoption, things like microfinance and fair trade, things like “teach a man to fish.” And I will try to do it in fourteen minutes.
AUDIENCE
[laughs]
MARK WEBER
I started with microfinance. Microfinance is interesting. Extending financial services to people is good. It’s important. It’s part of what we all experience. But microcredit—which is what microfinance became synonymous with—will not end poverty. Okay? Financial services, savings, checking, insurance, retirement—these things do matter. But it will not end poverty. It is not a silver bullet.
And business, by the way, is not a utopian solution. We have to be really careful. We can appreciate markets and business and the symphony of human interaction that they make possible, but it is not Utopia, and it will not bring heaven on earth. It may be the bricks of a market economy but we still need that mortar that binds us and makes us much stronger than just a pile of bricks.
So with microfinance, you have the economic issues—which is that most people in all developed countries are not well off because they own tiny little businesses. SMEs, or small- and medium-sized enterprises make up the bulk of job creation in our economies. And we don’t say to kids when they are growing up or people when they are entering the work force, “You should own your own tiny little lemonade stand. That’s what you should do.” But that’s what we say to the poor. Most people need a job where risk is diffused through a company of people, and jobs come from companies.
Now there are some good companies out there and there are some bad companies out there, and this is where the democratic function of a market economy is so critical, because every time you spend a dollar, you are voting for a company, and you are voting for that company’s values.
We have a very compartmentalized understanding of charity right now, I think. We think, I have this part of my budget for charity—meaning how much I am going to donate to nonprofits or the church this year—and then I have the rest of budget. And in here I have a certain set of values, and in there I have a different set of values. I think we need to break that apart and have the same values throughout all of the money that we spend, throughout all of the activity that we engage in. Decompartmentalize this charitable ethos.
And one of the ways we can do that is by shifting. That doesn’t mean not supporting microfinance—I think you should be careful which ones you support, and be sober about some of the numbers that you see, like 99% repayment rate—but I do think we also need to not compartmentalize and also be looking for everyday companies that are producing everyday goods that share our values.
I had the privilege of visiting Bangladesh and studying the ready-made garment factory, and everything I am wearing today was made by companies that I visited. And more and more I am challenging myself to understand supply chains, how things are made, and voting for companies that have relationships with suppliers and don’t just view them as a number on their balance sheet. If we start voting with our dollars everyday, we can change the culture of business by voting for companies that see the persons that they are working with as persons, and not just as labor.
The other problem with microfinance is the cultural one, the silver bullet one. We already talked about that. Again, it’s not a broad dismissal of microfinance, but we have to be uncomfortable. We have to challenge ourselves to think more deeply about it.
The same thing with fair trade. Fair trade, if what you mean when you say it is “ethically made products where we are in relationship with the people who are making things,” great! But that’s not all of what Fair Trade meant, and that’s not what it meant in the beginning. In the beginning, the FLO in Europe was responding to a low, low price of coffee. That’s how we all came to know Fair Trade, was through coffee, and then it spread.
The problem is two-fold; again, there’s an economic and a cultural. The economic is that a low, low price of coffee—and we all know how Fair Trade works, you opt into a higher price—but a low, low price of coffee is a market signal of an oversupply. So the proper action is to transfer arable land to the production of something in greater demand. And if we artificially change that signal, then we actually tell people to produce more of something that they should be producing less of.
So what you had is a lot of companies, a lot of farms, who paid for certification, got Fair Trade certified, and then could not sell all their coffee on the Fair Trade market. So what you don’t know about Fair Trade is that a farmer might only sell twenty to fifty percent of its coffee on the Fair Trade market, and the rest they have to sell on the specialty coffee market or the commodities market, depending on their access.
The other problem is the cultural. What is fair? The FLO early on decided that what is fair is small share farms that are structured as cooperatives and give money to local NGOs. You can have Farm A where farmers make X, they meet those criteria; you could have Farm B where farmers make 3X but they’re big, large scale, and they don’t meet those criteria. They are structured as a business. This is intrinsically unfair because of the Western value system that is pushed on them, and they are not given the same access.
It is very interesting. We have to be careful about this ideological imperialism where we push on people in broad systematic ways what is and what should be, as opposed to coming in relationship and meeting people in their context.
Let’s move to social entrepreneurship. The danger of social entrepreneurship is this: categorically compartmentalizing—just like we do with charity—here is where there are business people who are doing good and here is everybody else. We need to change the culture of business. The culture of entrepreneurship should be service oriented, value-creating oriented. It should entail a vertical integration of that same ethos that drives us to philanthropy.
The problem with the current models and a lot of the predominate models of social entrepreneurship is old, repackaged caused charity models that flood markets with free stuff in the name of helping people. Now, I got to tell you, that’s a powerful story. That’s a 95% reduction in sales that ___ had, right?
I cannot tell you how many stories we found like that. A backpack entrepreneur in Haiti who went out of business because of kids at justice conferences stuffing backpacks full of stuff and shipping them down. A peanut butter entrepreneur, where—by the way, Haiti has tons of peanuts, and they are very proud of their local Mamba. We showed them a video of a church raising twenty-eight thousand jars of peanut butter to send to Haiti because it is high in protein and it doesn’t spoil on the docks. But we don’t even ask, “Are there peanuts in Haiti?”
We found in Kenya second-hand clothes. Look at the research on the Kenyan textile industry in the 80s and what happened and the layoffs and how many factories closed. And yet every year we see the NFL bragging about how it sends one hundred thousand Super Bowl loser t-shirts to Africa, and we pat them on the back for it. We have to be really careful about these kinds of things. We have to be really careful. Relationship will open our eyes to them. Relationship will open our eyes to them.
So when I think about social entrepreneurship, TOMS Shoes, very popular. Watch the film and listen to what some Haitians have to say about TOMS Shoes, the way they react. And again, please understand me, this is not about pointing fingers; this is about getting real with ourselves. And I will tell you story after story of mistakes I’ve made, so don’t feel like I am pointing the finger if you have a pair of TOMS Shoes on right now.
AUDIENCE
[laughs]
MARK WEBER
Okay? Because I guarantee there is somebody. I guess everybody is formal today, but there will be some students tonight who are watching a film, hearing what Haitians have to say about TOMS Shoes, and they will be wearing TOMS Shoes. And that’s okay. That’s okay. Because that’s growth! Again, growth is uncomfortable; it hurts. And we can’t shy away from that.
I just want to wrap up by addressing another thing that is very difficult for us Christians, especially over the last ten years; international adoption in orphanages is on our hearts. In the book of James, we all know—yeah, I’m Catholic; I still know my Scripture.
AUDIENCE
[laughs]
MARK WEBER
I know you don’t think I do! “True religion is this, to care for the widow and the orphan, and? C’mon, Protestants…
AUDIENCE
[laughs]
PARTICIPANT
“…to remain undefiled by the world.”
MARK WEBER
“…to remain undefiled by the world.” You know what I noticed? There is a powerful, powerful story in the film of a young American couple named Shelley and Corrigan Clay. By the way, we learned so much making this film that we did not know before, and this is one of the stories that just blew our minds.
Corrigan and Shelley Clay, young American couple, inspired to move to Haiti. They sold everything they had and moved to Haiti to adopt Haitian children and start an orphanage. Christian couple, by the way. And wisely, they decided to work in orphanages for a year or more first to really understand the lay of the land and the culture and to learn the language.
And during that year, they found that over eighty percent of the kids in these homes had at least one living parent. That is a Haitian government statistic. In their experience, it was actually quite a lot higher. Over eighty percent of the kids in these institutionalized care have at least one living parent, and in their experience, a lot of those parents loved their kids a lot. They abandoned them at the orphanage but they would continue to visit them, and the only reason they left them there was because they had no opportunity.
It was an economic relinquishment, as we say, which sounds so economic. Think how painful that is! Shelley Clay says in the film, “I just realized I am spending twenty thousand dollars to adopt a child that a mother wants, and the injustice of that really hit me.”
So they stayed in Haiti, but they decided to redirect that savings into starting a small business, and now they employ over three hundred men and women. It is very interesting. She says, “We started by doing a women’s thing.” It’s an artisan company. “Because that’s the thing to do. That’s what people do.” That’s what a lot of microfinance is. And she said, “But then we realized fathers are parents too.”
AUDIENCE
[laughs]
MARK WEBER
Now the data will tell you that if a father receives an increase income, less of that income will go to the children than if a mother receives an increase in income, therefore—the data in a secular world will say—put all of the resources into the mother and the kid will be better off.
The problem is that you haven’t addressed the real problem, which is the father’s sense of responsibility and empowerment in the family. So by cutting him out and excluding him more, does that problem go away or does it get worse? This is why the church is so important.
I want to affirm a lot of you pastors in the room and a lot of people in the church in the room to focus on core competencies. There’s a lot of energy in the church around entrepreneurship and job creation, but you know what? Not all pastors are meant to build enterprises that create jobs. It’s not necessarily what you should be doing. You can affirm and encourage and create an environment and culture and ecosystem that encourages that, but maybe you role is to shepherd mothers and fathers to be good parents to their children.
And, by the way, as a young married person, to help couples love one another. Because if you want to look at America, for instance, at some of the biggest indicators of poverty—it’s not race; it’s broken families. Broken families is one of the biggest—that and a criminal record—the biggest two indicators of poverty in the U.S.
So I want to encourage you to think about the family and think about empowering parents to be good to each other and to be good to their children. That is a principle that is universal. When we think about how do we address the needs of orphans, we have to think about how to we empower parents to be parents for their own children. I have never seen a child sponsorship commercial with a parent. Not one.
Christians, family is who we are. And we cannot isolate children and become their parents. We have to empower their parents to be parents, the heroes to their children, and not try to make ourselves the heroes of other people’s stories.
AUDIENCE
[applauds]
MARK WEBER
This is the last uncomfortable thing I will throw at you. But it opened my eyes. I’ll tell you what, Save the Children—to their credit—is thinking a lot about these kinds of things, and they called a meeting in the U.K. and brought in about forty of us. I was one of the only non-practitioners; most were childcare practitioners from all over the world. The focus on the meeting was based on a consensus in the room that volunteering in orphanages is bad for kids. I have volunteered in an orphanage, so do not feel pointed at.
Why? First of all, there is a lot of abuse going on. And everybody in the room is breathing a huge sigh of relief, That’s not who I am. I’m in the clear. Here is something that applies to all of us. Almost every child—whether they have a parent or not—that is living in institutionalized care is suffering from an attachment disorder of some kind. And we come in and we hug them and we love them and we give them toys and we play with them and we take pictures with them… and then we’re gone. Forever. Or maybe we come back once a year.
And this does not just happen when you are there; this happens to them over and over and over, because we’ve turned these places into zoos, so that we can live out our call to the book of James. Guys, we have to get serious. Really serious. Because when children do end up getting adopted a lot of times—and you adoptive parents may know this in the room—people struggle with the outcomes of that attachment disorder for years, and it can be really hard on families. Children need stable environments, not love coming and going and coming and going and coming and going.
So first, the two things I want to leave you with, in the spirit of the job-creating heroes that you saw in the film—who, by the way, yes, they tapped into resources like Partners Worldwide, Mentorship, even though he ends with “Teach a man to fish,” honestly I think we have to move beyond “Teach a man to fish,” I don’t think it’s the right way to think about. As Doug Seebeck of Parnters Worldwide once said in an interview with us, “You know I moved to Bangladesh to teach a man to fish, and then I quickly realized that these people already know how to fish!”
AUDIENCE
[laughs]
MARK WEBER
“…they just don’t have access to the pond! And once they catch the fish, they have a very hard time bringing it to market,” in a way that’s in a protected system where they can access formal networks of productivity and exchange and actually grow. They are just subsistence fishermen for the rest of their lives if we just teach them how to fish. Keep that in mind.
But again, the thing that I really want to leave you with and I really hope you remember, is that—just as I learned in Bangladesh—we can’t make ourselves the protagonists of this story of development. We can come into relationship with people, we can learn from them, we can buy from them, we can do a lot of good, but we can’t make ourselves the heroes—especially when it comes to parents and children.
So if you are struck by anything that we talked about tonight, I just want to encourage you to take out your phone right now and email us so that we can come into relationship with you. I was supposed to start graduate school at MIT this past year—and the film had won all of these awards, and it is a great temptation to just put it on your resume, on your trophy shelf, and just move on with your life—but I decided to defer so that I could come around and meet people and talk about these things all over the country and all over the world.
So we would love, especially as Christians, to come to your churches, to come to your schools, to talk about these things, to introduce people to the people we met in the film who changed us so hopefully they can change more people and really elevate and amplify their voices. Email us. My personal email is mweber@povertyinc.org. If you email info@povertyinc.org, that goes to me, and it also goes to our director and our impact producer.
The film is available on iTunes and Amazon right now; it will be on Netflix in the summer. But again, it is not just about sitting there and watching it on your iPad; it’s really about bringing people together to sink our teeth into the complexity of these things and grow from the discomfort that these stories cause us. Thank you.
AUDIENCE
[applauds]