Dustin Hayes is the Generosity Specialist for The Chalmers Center in Chattanooga. Hayes is a younger man in a blue long sleeve button down shirt, but visible are some tattoos that run down his arms. He has a warm smile and a firm handshake. Hayes grew up in poverty and chose to work at The Chalmers Center because he knew that Chalmers knew something about the gospel and the Kingdom that he wanted to learn more about.
The Chalmers Center is a red brick building with a black door and the white Chalmers logo in the door. When entering in the front door, visitors will be greeted by Ms. Copland, who works at the front desk. On Hayes’s desk is a cup of coffee, even though he doesn’t particularly care for coffee. He is most likely working on his computer with his headphones on. His desk is made of fake wood with white metal legs. As the Generosity Specialist, Hayes helps with the fundraiser team and also communicates with donors. He is a certified ambassador, which means that he is able to tell people about what Chalmers does and about their products. This also means that he knows a little bit about everything that Chalmers does and can explain it to anyone.
The mission statement at The Chalmers Center is to “Equip God’s people to rethink poverty and respond with practical biblical principles so that all restored flourishing” (Chalmers). They believe in equipping God’s people or the Church to serve low income communities through a two step process. “The first step is to rethink poverty,” Hayes says. When it comes to the definition of poverty, The Chalmers Center challenges people with the thought that while material lack is important to address, Scripture also talks about deeper and more spiritual things that are happening in poverty. The Chalmers Center believes that poverty stems from relational brokenness with God and with yourself. One of the examples Hayes gives is not feeling dignity and pride to even go out of the house to work. Thus, seeing yourself as locked inside of generational poverty is something that happens more than we think. The second step to The Chalmers Center poverty alleviation process is to respond. Chalmers believes in doing something with practical biblical principles. Chalmers is also trying to answer important questions: What does it look like to biblically address poverty? Where is the proper place to give handouts? The aim is to challenge people so that people can restore to flourishing.
Chalmers creates resources such as curriculums to help churches guide people through financial literacy. The churches teach people money management skills and how to relate to their money from a biblical perspective. The curriculum covers what it means to be a steward and gives people tools to navigate the American economic system, if they are in the United States. The Chalmers Center also creates job readiness programs on how to get a job, how to keep a job, how to talk about their skills, and how to handle workplace conflict. A lot of people who come from material poverty come from traumatized backgrounds, Hayes says, and this tends to lead towards more conflict and there are psychological reasons for this. Chalmers creates those resources and trains churches to use those resources.
Why is a relationship with people so important when it comes to addressing poverty, and how can these relationships be built? Chalmers believes that fundamentally the underlying issue of poverty is an issue of relationship. One of the causes of poverty is individual brokenness that is saying that there is a base sinfulness and which causes break in relationships. This comes out in addiction, irrationally spending money, and bad spending habits. It also comes out as bad saving habits not thinking about the future (Fikkert). Individual relationships can’t be fixed without healthy relationships, Hayes says. Healthy relationships have to be modeled to build trust. Relationships are created through walking with people over a long period of time, and this is the only real way to achieve true habilitation. The different steps to building a relationship are crisis, rehabilitation, and development. First is the crisis, which is an immediate need that is necessary for survival. When addressing a person in crisis, this kind of help does not need a relationship. Secondly is rehabilitation, which is getting the individual back to the place where they are standing on their own two feet. Finally, development is how to get a person in poverty to a place where they are growing.
Chalmers partners with organizations in specific places so that they can build relationships with people. The goal is for the people that are offering help to better understand the context of the people who need help. When asked how people are able to help people without hurting them, Hayes responds that there are questions that we need to ask of each church or organization doing this work: “First, do they have models that have dependency, or models that enable or empower people? A way to tell the difference is [to make sure we are not] doing things for people that they can absolutely do themselves. For example, constantly handing them money when they are able to work. The model needs to shift from handing them money to helping them get a job. We don’t want to create dependency, but we want to build them up and strengthen them so if we completely disappeared they would continue to go on because we have helped them get a job.” The second question Chamlers asks the organization looking to help those in poverty is “do we have dignity building promoting procedures? Are we undercutting their dignity, or are we confirming that they are made in the image of God to steward their relationship through creation through work? We are not dignifying them if we are not trying to get them a job,” Hayes concludes.
Hurtful poverty alleviation results in long term effects on people’s dignity because as a person they end up absolutely needing outside help and because it is not viable for the organization to pay people’s bills every month for a long period of time and continue to minister to other people. Secondly, as a person it's just psychologically damaging to continually believe that the only way for another person to survive is through someone else. It's debilitating, which ends up locking a person experiencing poverty inside of a mindset and therefore inside a behavior that continually stops them from becoming a steward.
Simply put, hurtful poverty alleviation results in generational poverty and loss of dignity. If a child is watching a parent and the message that they are constantly receiving is that the only way to make it through life is to depend on others to help, then they are going to grow up and do the same thing because they are going to believe that they are locked into this lifestyle. This cycle keeps being repeated until someone realizes that it does not have to be that way, and there is a way out.
The Chalmers Center staff believe that individual brokenness, systemic brokenness, false stories of change, broken and destructive formative practices, and demonic forces are the five reasons for poverty (Fikkert). Chalmers believes that all of these are all connected to broken relationships. The Chalmers Center is working on poverty alleviation by bringing God’s people to flourishing by building healthy relationships.
Works Cited
Fikkert, Brian. “Addressing the Five Causes of Poverty.” The Chalmers Center, 6 August 2019, https://chalmers.org/blog/addressing-the-five-causes-of-poverty/. Accessed 20 November 2024.
Hayes, Dustin. Personal interview. 13 November 2024.
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