This Do Justice episode features Carol Bremer-Bennett, co-Executive Director of World Renew. She discusses the organization's 60-year history, its community-centered approach to relief and development, and its commitment to Core Humanitarian Standards. Carol shares powerful stories of transformation, including Miri's journey from addiction and the peacebuilding efforts in India, highlighting how hope and abundance emerge through God's work in seemingly desperate situations.

This is season 10 episode 4 of the Do Justice podcast.

Chris: Hello, friends, and welcome to another episode of Do Justice. My name is Chris Orme and today I'm really excited to be joined by Carol Bremer-Bennett. Carol is World Renew's co-Executive Director based in the U.S. Carol is an educator by training, with an MA in Educational Leadership from Western New Mexico University in Gallup. Carol has served on the Calvin College Board of Trustees, she's served as a Deacon at her church. In your bio, Carol, it says that your early relationships were formed by your childhood in West Michigan, where you were adopted as an infant by Paul and Jackie Bremer. It says also that after graduating from Calvin College you headed to New Mexico to explore your Navajo heritage. It says there that you found a place when a Navajo leader ceremonially adopted you as his sister. Carol and her husband, Theo, live in Michigan and they have three children of Navajo descent and three of Ethiopian descent. Carol, I just want to say, I have had the opportunity—I've been with World Renew for seven years, and your heart for justice and the uncompromising way that you speak truth, truth in a prophetic way, in a loving way, in a kind and accessible way, but always in a powerful way, is something that I deeply admire and enjoy about working with you. Carol, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for doing this with us today.

Carol: Well, Ahéhee is how you say, "Thank you," in Navajo. I'm so pleased to be with you in this time on the Do Justice podcast and certainly want to honor my Navajo roots, as you did, in naming that my clans are the To’aheedliinii and the Todich’iinii people, which is the the Water Flows Together and the Bitter Water people, as water is a sacred thing in the desert and so a lot of places are named for that. Certainly, I also honor the creator and the way that the Living Water is in me and hopefully through me and through the good work of World Renew. Thank you for that gracious introduction.

Chris: Thanks again for taking the time. I'm excited for this conversation. Let's start big. Let's go to the top, let's go 30,000 feet up. For folks who are listening along with us today, maybe they're not familiar with who World Renew is, what World Renew is. Can you tell a little bit about World Renew? Maybe about the history, too—where we've come from—and the type of work that we do.

Carol: World Renew is what was typically called a relief and development organization and it was founded by the Christian Reformed Church of North America over 60 years ago. I love picturing those founding days where church deacons were in their basements, in their meetings in the churches, trying to figure how: How do we respond to the challenges of the day? As they wanted to serve those who were fleeing war zones and coming to North America, as they were looking at some of the disasters. In Michigan, there were some tornadoes that had just hit. There were other natural disasters. Each church had to try to figure out how to have presence and to care for vulnerable people in those spaces and they realized that they just didn't have the expertise. They didn't have those global connections, and they said, "There has got to be a better way to do this, if we could work together as churches instead of each church trying to do their own thing and making it up each time." So they said, "Let's form a committee." And sometimes committees get a bad rap, but World Renew was formed as the Christian Reformed World Relief Committee and it has blossomed and is probably the best use of a committee that you can imagine. Now we serve in almost 30 countries around the world. We have grown and reshaped and restructured to meet the challenges that we see today and the challenges we're going to be meeting in the future. It's really a blessing. It's unique in its position within the denomination of the Christian Reformed Church in that because it is the diaconal work, we do not receive any ministry shares or any denominational funding. We have autonomy, I guess I would say, in some of our board structure and how we work because we need to be able to relate, without any other governance over us, to large foundations, to governments who fund us, to other workers and peers. We've been really blessed with the foresight of the founders of CRWRC and World Renew in that aspect. The work that we do is, right now, we've retooled it. I used to explain to people that about half of the work that we do in World Renew is responding to disasters in North America and around the world and half of the work that we do is in that long-term development work, fighting poverty and hunger and injustice. But now we're living into a new structure called the humanitarian nexus where we recognize that those worlds are integrated and woven into each other and so we need to have justice run through everything that we do. We need to have that long-term look at transformational development run through all of the work we do. Even if we're just starting in response because of a natural disaster or because of a human conflict, we still need to have that look of that long-term and the short-term together. We've woven those together in our humanitarian nexus and we've restructured the organization recently to also work in that way. So one of the things that I love about World Renew, especially as an Indigenous person, is that we recognize that community is at the center. God created us to be in relationship and connected with one another and World Renew seeks to not displace or interrupt that natural structure wherever we go, and we go to some very remote places around the world. Our role is to walk alongside communities responding to poverty, disaster, injustice, not as outsiders bringing solutions, but as true partners listening deeply, learning humbly, and trying to work to be co-creators in the change that communities desire to have. Our founding verse is from Micah 6:8. We're called to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God. We work and respond out of that call of relationship with our creator, knowing that there's an original goodness and blessing that he put into the world and that he desires for the world and that the world is very broken, so we need to work to restore those relationships that have been severed and broken. In that, communities will find wholeness and reconciliation with each other, and beauty once again, and ultimately we recognize that that's the saving work of Jesus. So we partner with churches in these communities so that what the community experiences is much less about World Renew but very much more about their local church being the hands and feet of Jesus in that space. So it's an incredible, incredible organization and I am just honored and thrilled to be a part of it.

Chris: I love how you highlight the way that it's church-driven, community-driven. I just got back from Guatemala recently and got to see how we work with our partners. What was a resounding thread through all of that was that the solutions are here already. The expertise is here. The resources are here already. I'm talking in Guatemala. Our role is to come alongside and help build capacity. It's just a beautiful picture. So you've been serving as co-Executive Director for how long, now?

Carol: Almost ten years.

Chris: Ten years! Happy ten year.

Carol: Thank you.

Chris: Over your time—I'm sure it's happened many, many times—but is there a go-to story that you have in your back pocket about a time where you were just astonished about the impact the World Renew is having?

Carol: There are so many stories. My go-to story is about Miri in Tanzania, probably because it was my very first visit and Miri was—I met here in a small, rural village in Tanzania. As we drove there, the partners, the Africa In-Land Church of Tanzania that we partner with in that region, the staff of the church told me that the government had decided that this community wasn't worth helping. The alcoholism and unemployment and witchcraft and other things were so rampant that they had tried to go in as a government several times and could not affect change. The Africa In-Land Church of Tanzania had attempted a few times, as well, in the hopes of spreading the good news of the Gospel, and they gave up, too. In fact, one of their workers got chased out of the town. When World Renew started to work in that region, the staff said, "We've got this community and we'd really like to go to them but we haven't had any luck. Can we try again?" So they tried again, with World Renew's support. They were certainly the ones who were persevering, but World Renew was able to walk alongside that and came into that community. It reminded me, I think it struck me, because it did remind me of a lot of things that I've experienced with Indigenous communities around the world, especially. Recognizing that the forces of evil are real and the power of witchcraft is real and to see how that manifests itself into family dysfunction and hopelessness and the alcoholism and the other addictions, was something that was familiar to me. What wasn't familiar to me was the incredible transformation that was taking place. I met Miri in a church that was still not-yet all the way built, but it was huge. She told me that her desire with that church structure is that the entire community will be able to fit in the church because she wanted everybody to become a Christian and that's why they built it so big. Then, she started to share her story. She said she used to be addicted to alcohol. She was a single parent raising four children and she was so addicted that she would get drunk—they had their own kind of moonshine that they made on their own in the community—she would get drunk. She would pass out. She wouldn't know where she was when she woke up. She doesn't know what untold things happened to her during those times when she was so intoxicated that she didn't know what was going on. People would drag her back to her house and she'd wake up there. She was completely neglecting her children. She said she one-time, badly enough, wanted to get some food and she'd spend the money on alcohol and she cooked up that meat in front of her children and proceeded to eat the entire amount of meat right in front of her hungry children without any thought to feed them. She said, "That was my low point as a person, as a mother, when I realized that that's what I would do with them sitting with their hungry eyes right in front of me." Then, she saw the Jesus through the work of World Renew and the Africa In-Land Church of Tanzania staff and she couldn't believe that Jesus came for her. That he would love her, even when she was very much not loving anyone else, and really not even loving herself. Even in her selfish, addictive actions. She completely turned her life around. When I met her, she had been sober, she had taken all of the trainings, she had become an owner of a lot of chickens (probably through the World Renew gift catalogue). She was running a chicken business and she said, "When I was drunk, I was not a nice person. I even beat up these men here in the front row, multiple times." And she had a large arm-span and she was a tall woman and all the men sat there, nodding their heads like, "Yes, I've been beat up by Miri when she was drunk" [laughs]. She said, "And now I feed them. And now I feed my children. Through the help of World Renew, I am providing for my family, I am not addicted any longer." It was such a beautiful story. Sure enough, out came food that they fed us in abundance. There's Miri, serving everybody rather than just serving herself. I have just loved that story. I've gone back to Tanzania and I've had hopes of seeing Miri again, but I haven't. Seven years later I was able to talk to her on the phone. She is now a trainer of trainers. And she wasn't around to meet with me because she now goes out and she works with the Development Office of the Africa In-Land Church of Tanzania. She does trauma healing, she does chicken/poultry training to farmers, she does women's savings groups. One of her children, she told me, that was so hungry for so long, was about to graduate from university. It was such a complete transformation that I hold Miri in my heart and she goes with me a lot of places.

Chris: That's amazing. We, as an organization, World Renew has been working to become certified through the Core Humanitarian Standards. The CHS Alliance. Internally, we've talked a lot about our safeguarding policies. A lot of how we operate has been brought alongside these standards. Can you talk a little bit about: What are the Core Humanitarian Standards and how they help us do this work in the best possible way?

Carol: What I love about the Core Humanitarian Standard is I think that they can each be connected to Biblical principles and truth that we embrace and that we value at World Renew, and live into. As you mentioned in my intro, I used to be a Superintendent and in the education world. It's a very familiar space for me to look out for the safe-guarding of children. It's so important that we also do that at World Renew. We're working with some of the most vulnerable people in the world at the most vulnerable moments and there's been horrific incidences of abuse of power and using scarcity and desperation against people, committing terrible acts of exploitation and sexual abuse and so forth to these populations. As Christian organizations in that sector and in those spaces, we need to make sure that we are working hard to ensure that everybody is being treated with dignity and respect. We absolutely dig deep into the knowledge that every person bears the image of God, and so restoration and justice and dignity are not ideals, they're sacred responsibilities. We're told time and time again in Scripture that what we do to the least of these, or what we don't do to the least of these, reflects what we're doing right to Jesus and how we're responding to God and God's love towards us, or rejecting it completely. I'm proud to have World Renew certified in the Core Humanitarian Standard. Those standards touch a lot of different areas, including our own internal policies and how we treat our own staff with that same dignity, that we are working as complementary partners in these spaces where resources are being given, that we're very attuned to making sure that what we deliver as far as a response goes is appropriate for the population that we need to have and that we're working with. It's so important that we work at those best practices and I'm so thankful that World Renew has made those commitments. It also has financial and stewardship components to it, to make sure that we are living up to the highest standard and have integrity as an organization. The Alliance has been a good benefit for World Renew, bringing us partners and learnings and making sure that anybody in our programs anywhere can voice discontent. Can let us know through our complaints mechanism if we failed in any way. Some of that is feedback, saying, "This response where you brought grain to our community came too late," or "We really couldn't handle it, there were so many women and children carrying big bags of grain home, it's not possible. You should have given us food vouchers instead." So we take all that feedback in, but we're also open and say, "We welcome complaints. Especially if we have made a promise and a commitment to a community and we've broken our own policies, we've broken our word." We're humble enough and have enough integrity that you get to tell us. That's a real switch in power, in a power imbalanced situation where you are the organization that has all of the stuff and has the staff and the vehicles and mobility and all the things that the people that you're serving don't have. To switch that power around and say, "We are here to serve you. We are here to serve you and you are allowed to tell us when we aren't doing it well," is really an important posture to have in those spaces.

Chris: One of my favorite things about the work that I get to do with World Renew is I just get to show up and bear witness to other people to what God is doing through World Renew, through our partners, through our teams around the world. I love it, and I know you love doing that, too, and you're awesome at it and it's fun to see you do that and see other members of our team go all around and do that. I assume well-intentions and well-meaning from a lot of people, so sometimes I get these questions back to me, and I'm sure you've had them, too, where someone who probably genuinely wants to know more will say something like, "You know, poverty in developing countries is so widespread and deeply rooted, any small project I support will just be a drop in the ocean. What's the difference?" How would you respond to that perspective?

Carol: Well, as somebody who knows that water is sacred, every drop of water is sacred. Go live in the desert for a while and recognize how a drop of water can nourish a seed and help it to flourish and to grow. Go and see how a drop of rain and a few more drops, and a few more drops, can quickly become a flash flood. You know, I think that we're called—and the Bible is full of examples of how water is a power, and it doesn't take that much. We see this in devastation, but it doesn't take that much to have a power, and it can be a power for good, too. I love the verse in Amos 5 where it talks about justice: "Let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream." There is power in each drop. So I would never let anybody think that they're too small to make a difference, that their effort is too small. I do think what's underneath that, Chris, is a frustration, perhaps? Where people have tried to do something and they are feeling like it doesn't make a difference. They're spinning their wheels, perhaps. I would offer that, perhaps, they need to look at a different model of trying to help. Because perhaps what they're trying to do in helping in past situations actually wasn't helpful. Had all kinds of good intent, but actually couldn't have that impact because of the way that the program was set up or who designed it, if it wasn't co-created with the people that it's intended to impact. I think that's where that frustration can grow out of. I think that World Renew offers a different way of approaching the process in the first place, that people don't realize that that makes a difference. That makes a difference for your investment dollar that you're trying to help, or your time and your talent that you're trying to give. It can really change things. I remember working with some mission groups that came out to the reservation and they came out with so much energy and passion to help. The leader came to me after about eight years and said, "You know what, I'm not sure we're going to come next year. I feel that we are back at the same church painting the same side of the building that we painted three years ago and I don't see anything changing." Nothing had been done to work on the relationship between the group and the community or conversation about what the desired impact or plan was. I can see why people would feel like, "That doesn't make a difference," and it's probably true. With all your love and all your heart that you want to give it maybe really didn't make a difference or impact transformation for that church community. I think you need to be smart and be wise and ask good questions when you're looking for a way and a place to give to, whether that's your dollars or your time. I think that's really important. 

Chris: Building on that, talk about how World Renew is being smart and being wise. I've seen it. We've talked about this before, but maybe say a little bit about that. How do we work wisely?

Carol: I've been able to see communities entered in—go visit communities in Bangladesh, was one place, where I went right when we were at the beginning of working with a group of people. To see, right from the start—I think I visited a women's savings group that had only been meeting for three months. I think they were meeting maybe every other week, so maybe they had had six meetings. To see how, right from the start, it was the women leading other women. Already, the partner and the World Renew staff were not there leading the sessions. There was true ownership of that group. The women, they lived in a piece of land that was surrounded by three rivers and they had been flooded out seventeen times in the last few years. My first question is: Why do you keep going back to that place? Don't you want to move? That might not be the best place to live. But they were displaced people who had no resources to own and this was the place that they could try to eke out an existence with some farming and some other activities. They didn't have another place. They literally—each of them had a mount of dirt in the outside area of their living space that was probably about four feet high and that's where they would go and seek refuge when the waters would rise, because the waters usually rose like three feet. They had made these mounds of safety where they could sit and wait for weeks for the water to go down, and sleep in a dry spot. To see these women coming together to start to build community. They were there to be a village savings and loan group where they each learned about saving some money and putting just the smallest amount and building up this savings bank together. No money from World Renew, no money from the partner, all money from just the women themselves. And then to know that they were going to start to lend that out to each other with some interest, but carefully start to lend that out so that they might be able to raise their house a bit or put on a tin roof instead of a thatched roof or pay the school fees for their children to be able to go to class or diversify their diet and add some chickens or ducks. Ducks are better in Bangladesh because they know how to swim when those flood waters come. So they would be doing that and World Renew would be walking alongside that whole process. I think that's how we are smarter and wiser and better: to quickly get ourselves way in the background of the picture and story and to let the story truly be their story. Let the transformation be their transformation. I'm so excited to go back to Bangladesh and to visit that group again and to see, after a few years, where they're at. I already saw so much potential, and it wasn't just about saving. These women were starting to share recipes and share stories of good practice for hygiene and care for children. They were able to support one another. There was a high degree of domestic violence in that community as well, and they said, "We went through seventeen floods in the past years, and every single one of them we were standing and sleeping on those mounds of dirt in our houses and we were all alone. We did not have even each other because we did not know each other, and now we have this women's group. Now we have community. When the next flood hits, and it will, it's going to be completely different. We're actually going to be able to get through it together." I just wept. I couldn't believe the potential that these women had already tapped into prior to the storm, based on the experience of their storms. I was just so proud and humbled to know that World Renew had a part in that story.

Chris: We're quickly coming up against time, here, so I want to ask one more question. You've painted a great picture and told some beautiful stories for us of how God has been at work through World Renew, but in your work, in your almost ten years of leadership and serving in the capacity that you are, how have you seen hope and abundance emerge in situations that seem defined by scarcity or crisis? Where does the hope come from? Where does the abundance come from?

Carol: It can only be from God. Even in these stories that I've already told, it's not us. It's not the church. It's not the individual. It's God. We work with Truth Centered Transformation in a number of our countries and the developer of that program, Anna Ho, I've been able to hear her speak and watch her train our staff in a couple of different regions. She talks about how, on a good day, someone will say, "Oh, World Renew did this for me and changed my life." On a better day they'll say, "My church, the church partner that World Renew worked with, helped me do this." On an even better day, they'll say, "I did it! I did this change." But on the best day they say, "God did this. God did this. None of those other things could have done it all alone." And that's really the true story and the true power of this ministry. It's to get to the point where people see God's spirit through all of this. I've seen so many examples. I was thinking about Bangladesh, but I also was thinking about an experience I had in India. This was a region where two tribes were warring with each other. The Malto and the Santhal people were at odds with one another and World Renew had been asked to come in with a USAID grant to help fight childhood stunting in that region. It became quickly apparent to World Renew that we couldn't just administer this USAID grant to work on maternal-newborn child health if people are killing each other over somebody's cow wandering into somebody else's field. If they're taking retaliatory action because somebody went up the mountain and chopped down some firewood in a place without permission. It didn't matter how healthy the food was or how much progress you were making with pregnant women if the children who were going to be born were going to be at war with one another. So, World Renew found additional funds to be able to work on peace-building in that area. When I got to go I saw two tribes who had been at war with each other for a very long time—both Christian tribes, because missionaries had come to that region, but still that tension and that action and violence against one another. The tribe that had taken over the valley and pushed the other tribe up the mountainside to the area where you really couldn't grow rice, they were always constantly fighting against the scarcity of the resources in the area. Now, they have these peace-building committees where, when a conflict happens, everybody knows you bring that conflict to the committee and they sit and present what happened and together the integrated tribal committee decides what would be the proper restitution and justice that could be done in this situation so that people don't have to be killed. I got to go on a day when they were having a joint worship service, which I think they do like four times a year. My feet, as is tradition in that community, were washed by the women who were helping to get ready for the service. The men were all off cooking, which was really a surprise to me. You could even still tell, at that time, the Malto tribe was physically much smaller than the Santhal tribe because the Malto tribe was the tribe that had been pushed up the mountain side and displaced. They were smaller because of the childhood stunting. One woman washed my feet, another woman dried my feet, another woman put the oil on. You could see these were women from different tribes working together to welcome a visitor into their midst. Later that day, after the worship service, I went to a soccer match and there were thousands of people. I know this was a multi-day soccer tournament that was being put on. They integrated the teams together. It was the first day they let girls have a team, too, so girls were playing when I arrived. They let me ceremonially kick a soccer ball out for the opening of that particular game. They were coming together around something they all loved, which was the sport of football, and playing soccer together, and the women's savings groups all had booths set up around the playing area. They were selling crafts, they were selling things that they had done with tailoring and sewed, and they were selling different foods. Every savings group had made a marketing plan to bring more money into their particular businesses and it was just so amazing. The next day, I met the four young people, two from each tribe, who had organized that whole thing, who were in their early twenties. That's, I think, where I see hope. When people can figure out and set aside decades-long differences and violence against each other and teach the young people and have the young people lead in this effort to have a new path forward. A path that is about peace and stability and will have a system set up so that there can be justice because things happen. There will be brokenness in the world, but it doesn't mean that people need to take the law into their own hands and have retaliation. So that just fills me with so much hope.

Chris: Our guest today has been Carol Bremer-Bennett, co-Executive Director based out of Grand Rapids—well, Byron Center, now—where our World Renew office is. If you want to learn more about World Renew in the U.S., you can check out worldrenew.net. In Canada, worldrenew.ca. Carol, thank you so much for spending the time with us and sharing your heart.

Carol: You're welcome. Thank you for having me.