By far the most enthusiastic feedback we received at Karam Forum 2022 was from the conversation between Helen Young Hayes of Activate Workforce Solutions and Denise Daniels of Wheaton College. Hayes described her revolutionary experience leaving the heights of Wall Street to start a business in Denver that hires workers on the margins who need a path into the workforce, creating “triple wins for job seekers, employers and the community.”
If you haven’t seen it already, take nine minutes to watch Hayes’ breathtaking story in this video from the Faith & Co. series, produced by the Center for Faithful Business at Seattle Pacific University:
The conversation between Hayes and Daniels was the second part of our session on “Christian Entrepreneurship: Communities Thriving in a Changing World,” and the last part of Karam Forum – except, of course, for our traditional closing hymns! It was a fascinating discussion of how distinctively Christian entrepreneurship can transform lives and communities.
Below are selections from the conversation. Check out the full video for more!
On Her Personal Sense of Mission for the Economic Flourishing of the Underserved
There were many factors that shaped my concern with the underserved, and I’d say the first one is that I’m the daughter of Chinese immigrants. My parents lost everything during World War II. They fled from city to city, and they led lives of great instability. They finally came to this country on borrowed money and on full scholarship, and ultimately sent four kids to Yale on financial aid, so I feel blessed to have become the embodiment of the American dream.
They also, though, moved our family to Mississippi in 1965 – the deeply, deeply segregated, troubled South, where I witnessed up close the economic and social apartheid that African-Americans have suffered in this nation, especially in Mississippi. We ourselves were minorities. As Chinese-Americans, we were less than one-tenth of one percent of the population. We were the first Chinese family to move to our small town. And so I have known what it has been like to be on the outside looking in.
Additionally, when my husband and I first got married right out of college, we were really blessed to join a small-group Bible study. It was my first Bible study that I had joined, and with two other Ivy League couples we studied Richard Foster’s book on money, sex and power. And at the age of 22, I learned what God calls us to do with respect to loving and caring for the needs of those who are less fortunate than us. And so, we made a determination, then, that one of our enduring family values would be to love and care for the poor, and make it a priority for our family. And that was a wonderful time for us, to understand how money would influence us, how we would be influenced by money, how we would use it as a tool. At that early age.
I would say that the last influence on serving the marginalized and transforming myself from a donor to a doer in 2016, really had to do with decades of conversations that I’ve had with my friends in ministry who head up nonprofits, who have served the poor for decades, and their sense of frustration that they can never or rarely move people to economic flourishing. And when I ask them, why not? They tell me that they don’t have the resources, that they can’t tap into business or jobs, or wealth, or the economy.
And finally, as a result of the call in the Book of Esther, I realized that I think I can do something about that, and I can fix what is broken and what is lacking in the current space moving people to economic flourishing.
We Need a Bigger Vision of Flourishing, and We Need It Yesterday
I think so many pastors are really busy with caring about the spiritual needs of their congregants, and isn’t that the most important thing? I should say, first and foremost, that if we don’t address the poverty of spirit that we have, we’re missing the Great Commission, and we’re missing our first calling.
However, I do believe in a more holistic definition of flourishing. And I think about when the Lord instructed His disciples. You go feed them. You know, the feeding of the five thousand and the feeding of the four thousand. They said, send these people away. We’ve just preached to them. We’ve done really, really good work preaching the word, and so now send them away and tell them to go get some food. And so Jesus told them, you feed them. And I love that, and I believe that that is part of our calling.
I think that churches and pastors and educators can do a number of things. The first thing that we can do to help individuals move to economic flourishing is, we can educate ourselves. We can understand, for example, the areas of dysfunction and breakdown in the economy. And what leaves people frustrated and experiencing poverty, or experiencing lives of struggle?
Some important trends that we should all be aware of: trends in automation, trends in AI, trends in remote work. The dramatic decline and decrease in the number of entry-level, low-skill, low-wage jobs that, unfortunately, so many people rely upon. Those are evaporating quickly, and have evaporated because the future of work in the knowledge-based economy is upon us as we speak.
The other day I was in a movie theater, and I saw a giant, electronic robot vacuum cleaner. And usually, you’re used to seeing professional custodians cleaning those spaces late at night. Well, this one was just humming along quietly, doing its own thing, and probably had, you know, displaced two or three people. That’s a 1.5 million-person industry, and that’s just one example of automation and AI. And so, we need to be aware of trends that will affect our congregants and our greater community: trends in automation, trends in AI, the decrease in low-skilled jobs, the rapid increase in the demand for high-skilled jobs.
So the question, therefore, is: How do we move people from being equipped for low-skill jobs to high-skill jobs?
And how do we do it quickly? Because we’re running out of time. There’s an estimate that fifty percent of jobs will need to be completely reworked, and the people who are doing them, by 2025. And so, we don’t have a lot of time, and we need to move our congregants to be prepared for, and successful in, the economy that is right upon us.
