REDEEMING TIME
Disrupting Urban Poverty
Redeeming Time is a project that in partnership with House of Hope, a charity serving some 1,500 families in Penang, Malaysia. It aims to address the question, "What does it take to disrupt cyclical poverty among the urban poor?"
Poverty is a complicated social issue involving all areas of life – physical, psychological, social, cultural, and spiritual.
It is the result of relationships that are destructive – one’s relationship with self, with one’s community, and with the environment. It involves individuals, institutions, and whole systems that do not work towards the well-being of those in poverty.
Transformational change is a process involving many players and parts, but it starts with the person.
People, not programs, are the key to real and lasting change. However, as much as those who are poor have unique talents and capabilities, their identity is often marred by lies and labels that tell them they are lazy, ignorant, or unworthy. The result of poverty is that people who are poor no longer know who they are, nor do they believe that they have a vocation or gifts of any value.
Transformational change also begins with the individual’s relationships. In particular, relationships in the family should be built up to facilitate and promote flourishing.
We intend to test the hypothesis that those experiencing poverty can be built up through the areas of:
Identity
Vocation and Gifts
Relationships
In this project, “Redeeming Time”, we will work with partners to focus on a number of families over a period of 5 months to help them identify the issues that persistently cause them stress, and support them to work out and pilot solutions to address these issues.
Our hope is that:
These 4 families will be equipped to manage their stressors and increase their bandwidth to manage life’s challenges, which will, in turn, improve their decision-making ability in the long run.
The experience from this pilot will provide insight and learnings to sharpen and strengthen the work done by the House of Hope in supporting families affected by urban poverty, and other organisations like it.