The Daily Signal - When Good Intentions Go Wrong: America’s ‘Crisis of Dependency’

Episode Date: March 3, 2025

About 25 years ago, James Whitford and his wife founded a ministry to the poor and homeless in Missouri. Not long after starting the ministry, Whitford felt led by the Lord to see for himself what it was like to be homeless.    After several conversations with his wife, the couple agreed that Whitford would take a short period of time to live on the streets, and Whitford left his home with nothing but the clothes on his back.    Whitford found himself sitting on a street corner next to a young homeless man in his 30s named Ralph. Whitford had known Ralph for some time and had ministered to him many times, but now, the two were homeless together. It was well into the day and Whitford was hungry. Ralph pulled out a sandwich and offered Whitford half.    “And if you put yourself in that position of a homeless person offering his food to you, how do you respond? I didn't say it,” Whitford recalled, “but I remember feeling or thinking, well, ‘no, I'm not gonna take your sandwich, Ralph. I'm not gonna do that. I can go somewhere if I need to, and you're the ministry, and I'm the minister.”    At that moment, Whitford says he realized he had been “treating Ralph and thousands of other people as objects of my good intentions … rather than subjects who have autonomy, capacity and agency.” The experience changed Whitford’s perspective on serving the poor, and permanently affected the way he led his ministry, moving from a “handout model to a hand-up model.”   “If we're not engaging people in reciprocity in our charity, we are failing them horribly, doing them a disservice and not really upholding the inherent human dignity that is in every person,” Whitford said.    Unfortunately, Whitford says much of the government's programs intended to help the poor, and many charity programs, don’t engage the recipients dignity and have instead created significant harm through creating dependence on programs instead of empowerment.    Whitford, co-founder and CEO of True Charity, joins "The Daily Signal Podcast" to discuss his new book, “The Crisis of Dependency: How Our Efforts to Solve Poverty Are Trapping People in It and What We Can Do to Foster Freedom Instead.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At Desjardin, we speak business. We speak equipment modernization. We're fluent in data digitization and expansion into foreign markets. And we can talk all day about streamlining manufacturing processes. Because at Desjardin business, we speak the same language you do. Business. So join the more than 400,000 Canadian entrepreneurs who already count on us. And contact Desjardin today.

We'd love to talk, business. From the stories of real Americans to in-depth policy conversations, we are going beyond the headlines to discuss the issues and events that have and are shaping this nation. Welcome to the Daily Signal podcast weekend edition. I'm Virginia Allen, your host today. Thank you so much for joining us. We'll be right back with today's conversation. Pro-life, pro-women conservative and feminist?

That's right. We're problematic women. The radical left does not know what to do with struggling. independent women who believe in traditional values and love America. So you might say we're problematic to the left narrative of what a woman should be. Here on problematic women, we sort through the news to find the stories that you care about. Join Problematic Women on the Daily Signal's YouTube or Rumble every Wednesday or catch the show wherever you get your podcast on Thursday morning. And be sure to follow Problematic Women on Instagram. Get you and your crew to the big shows with GoTransit. Go connects to all the main concert venues like TD Coliseum in Hamilton and Scotia Bank Arena in Toronto,

and Go makes it affordable with special e-ticket fairs. A one-day weekend pass offers unlimited travel across the network on any weekend day or holiday for just $10. And a weekday group pass offers the same weekday travel flexibility from $30 for two people and up to $60 for five. Buy yours at gotransit.com slash tickets. Well, I am so pleased today to welcome for the second time back to the Daily Signal podcast. James Whitford. He serves as a CEO of True Charities and also out of that organization with birthed another organization, Water Garden Ministries. And you are also author of the recently released book, The Crisis of Dependency. And I'm excited to talk about this book and the work that

you have been up to in recent years and months. So welcome back to the show. Yeah. Thanks, Virginia. Great to be here again. Well, I love that you open the book with essentially kind of opening your of like, hey, this is how I got here. It's been a long journey for you of really decades of working around this idea of how do we actually get our hands dirty in this subject of poverty and homelessness and go about fixing the crisis. And you do a great job with a story as you open the book. And I'm wondering if you can share the story about Ralph and the Sandwich.

Yeah, Ralph and the Sandwich. Well, so just as a little background, my wife and I, I started gospel mission 25 years ago. And early on into the ministry, I began to feel compelling of sorts to go and live on the streets, which, and it was odd. I mean, the first time I felt it, I immediately thought I'm losing my mind and I just put it aside. And this is in Missouri, right? Right. It's, yep, southwest. Southwest Missouri, right? It was, yeah, it was, it was a wintertime. And anyway, I felt it again. And it's the second time. And I again, again, ignored it. And the third time I thought, I'm going to need to go and tell my wife that I feel like

God is telling me I'm supposed to go live on the streets. So I went and I told her. And immediately she said, oh, I think God will tell me before you go live on the streets. And it made sense. I mean, we had kids that we were raising at the time. But that very night, we were reading a book by Francis Chan called Crazy Love. And we were just opening to the section of a guy telling the story of a guy who voluntarily left and lived on the streets. And I looked over at her and there's a tear coming down in her face because she realizes this is like a sign like I'm supposed to do this. Now, there were a lot of things the next day. I left with nothing but the clothes on my back and spent a short amount of time on the streets. Just being with people and experiencing that. And

there are all sorts of things that you learn when you do something like that. that we won't take time to get into. But the story that you're referring to is one evening, I was with a homeless man about, you know, probably 30 years old or so named Ralph. And we knew Ralph well because we had been ministering to Ralph for a long time. Ralph and I are now homeless together. I'm sitting on the curb of Kentucky Avenue in downtown Joplin, Missouri with Ralph. Haven't had anything to eat but a donut that morning. Ralph pulls out a sandwich from a brown paper sack he had that was cut into and he said, James, would you like half of my sandwich? And if you put yourself in that position of a homeless person offering his food to you,

how do you respond? And I didn't say it, but I remember feeling or thinking, well, no, I'm not going to take your sandwich, Ralph. I'm not going to do that. You know, I can go somewhere if I need to and you're the ministry and I'm the minister. Now, I didn't say it, but I remember kind of feeling that. I'm thankful that I was hungry enough to break bread with Ralph that day. And when I did, I realized, like something happened at that moment. I realized I've been treating Ralph and thousands of other people as objects of my good intentions, rather than, like, objects of my benevolence, rather than subjects who have autonomy, capacity, and agency. So that was a big change for me. And it really led our ministry to become a different kind of ministry from a handout

model to a hand-up model. We're now we are asking people to earn the very basics that they need, realizing that every person, just like Ralph, has a capacity to contribute. And if we're not engaging people in reciprocity in our charity, we are failing them horribly, doing them a disservice and not really upholding the inherent human dignity that is in every person. And again, reciprocity is at the heart of the heart of that. what it is to be a human being. So our charity should embrace that. That moment with Ralph was a big

change point for us. Yeah. Powerful and bold to decide, okay, I'm going to go live among the people that I'm serving. And in this case, pretty extreme circumstances to go onto the street and say, I'm just going to fully immerse myself. And obviously, that has that experience so deeply impacted you. And I know is one of the results ultimately resulted in the writing of this book, the crisis of dependency. The full title of the book is the crisis of dependency, how our efforts to solve poverty are trapping people in it and what we can do to foster freedom instead. So let's talk a little bit about just like the models that you usually see with charity. What among the charity organizations that you see are kind of the typical programs that you see

implemented and how have you all tried to take a really different approach? Well, I mean, a lot of organizations are, they launch out of compassion, just like ours did. And compassion is a fuel that drives us to do something. When we see the brokenness of humanity or when we engage that, it causes us to want to do something. So that compassion is incredibly important. The problem is that compassion can lead to ineffective charity or can lead to effective charity. What do you mean by that? Well, ineffective charity would be one-way transactional handouts rather than seeing a person

is made in the image of God and therefore made in the image of a maker, a producer, and so every person being intended to make and to produce. And so a lot of charities, nonprofits, launch out of compassion, and they begin a handout type of model that just traps people in dependency. So there's these five steps to dependency out of the book, Toxic Charity by Robert Lupton. And he nailed it when he delineated these. He said, if you give something to somebody wants,

they'll appreciate it. If you give the same thing to that person again, they'll anticipate it's coming a third time. If you give it to them a third time, they'll have an expectation it's coming a fourth. A fourth time, they'll feel entitled to it, and a fifth time they'll be dependent on you for it. So it's appreciation, anticipation, anticipation,

entitlement and dependency. And I think that we are in a national crisis of dependency today. In part it's because, you know, as you've indicated, there are a lot of charities and nonprofits that are doing handouts that take people through those five steps and trap them in dependent poverty. But Virginia more so, I think, government welfare programs are creating tremendous amounts of dependency

and not allowing people the opportunity to escape of poverty. Talk a little bit more about that, if you would, because that's obviously a touchy subject in some ways, because it is emotional. And as human beings, we want to help. And honestly, sometimes it's easier to write a check and feel like, okay, I did something or to know, well, my tax dollars are going for this welfare program that's going to help people. But what is the slippery slope there? Yeah. Well, I mean, whether it's handing cash out on a corner to somebody holding a cardboard sign or just supporting a welfare program that's just going to hand stuff to people. It's not ever going, there's not enough aid that we've ever dumped into a developing nation

that's lifted it out of poverty, caused it to develop. And there's not enough aid that we can dump on a person that's going to actually help them escape poverty. People escape poverty because they go to work. Now, I mean, that's just the truth. Novel. I know. I know.

It's so simple. And of course, and I don't want to, I mean, poverty is complex. And a lot of people have a lot of hard, hard traumatizing backgrounds. And they need relationship and inspiration and somebody to walk alongside them. But the one common denominator for every person who's in poverty today to escape it is a job. There's no way to escape poverty without work or effort. And yet too many times our charity is not calling people toward effort. It's not challenging them to develop.

And, you know, I practiced physical therapy for a dozen years. And sometimes it was called a physical terrorist because I would go into a room and people don't want me to come into their room and do physical therapy because it doesn't feel good. But if I don't challenge my patients to develop the strength and mobility they need to escape their bed of infirmity, they'll remain there until they perish. The same thing goes with folks who are struggling in chronic poverty. If we don't, with compassion at the right time, implement challenge. If we don't challenge the poor to develop the strength and the mobility they need to escape their bed of poverty, they'll remain there until they perish. And that's happening in America today.

We have about 25 million Americans today who are trapped in dependent poverty, and they're on a trajectory to never escape it until they die. And so we have a lot of work to do in reforming how we think about the human person. How do we practice charity, both on the private front and in the public sphere as well? I really appreciate in the book that you don't sugarcoat how complicated, really, in some ways, this is that it's not a one-size-fits-all. You don't go in, and, you know, in 24 hours you have someone fixed up and they're ready to go. And, you know, they're never going to struggle again with the issue of poverty. is challenging and it's hard and it kind of takes getting your hands dirty and it's a long process

and when you're dealing with people, it's complicated. That said, if you were given the opportunity, let's say, in a city like San Francisco that does deal with a lot of poverty, a lot of homelessness, a lot of addiction, and you went in and leaders there in that city said, we are fully behind you, we want to solve this problem. What would you do first? Where is the starting block to go in and really with practical solutions, start solving a crisis. Well, there's a lot, that's a big question. Yeah. So there are a lot of perverse incentives, okay, things that are incentivizing people

toward poverty rather than incentivizing them to escape it. And so most of that comes from government and government welfare programs. And so we've got to, I think that's a good place to start. Actually, you start in both spheres, but as far as public policy, we need to be thinking about things like work requirements for able-bodied adults. That's so important. And that's one way that you can take welfare and begin to say that's not your first stop. You know, government welfare is not your first stop.

If we just were to implement work requirements. And right now, the Fiscal Responsibility Act that was passed in the summer of 23, buried in that legislation that was rushed through, is a ban on any work requirements. if you're homeless, if you're a veteran, or if you've aged out of the foster care system. How egregious is that? That you would just simply write into legislation, you know what? If you're homeless, we don't need you to work. We're going to give you food stamps and it's just fine.

If you're a veteran, you don't have anything to contribute. We're just going to give you food stamps. Or if you aged out of the foster care system. So that does not sunset until 2030. So whatever policy makers or leaders that might be listening to our policy makers, podcast, our talk today, we need to get to that piece of legislation and say, hey, hang on a second. If we have able-bodied adults, regardless of who they are, why is it that we wouldn't ask them to be contributors instead of just recipients of public charity?

So that's one thing. The other thing we need to do is really those nonprofit leaders, those church leaders that would come to a meeting in San Francisco, we need to teach the right ideas about the human person, being made in the image of God, how can we uphold that with our charity? And let's respect the idea of affiliation, or some people would refer to a subsidiarity, but it's the idea of what can an individual do through his own industry and initiative before the community tries to do it for him, before a nonprofit or a charity says, let me do that for you. But wait a second, we should be asking, what can you do first? What's in you gifting and skill that is going to be?

able to help you. I want to know about that. And then before I jump in as a mission leader and answer your problem, what about family? Is there family involved somewhere or a church that's involved that ought to be involved first? See, if we don't adhere to these ideas of subsidiarity and who's most closely affiliated to the person, we end up adopting blueprint, big program solutions that aren't solutions at all. And what they do is they divide or disrupt the natural ties that make. And make families and communities strong. So that's something we've got to get into the heads and the hearts of leaders in a city and then equip them with tools and training like we do through our True Charity initiative

and equip leaders with tools and training to be able to take these ideas you and I are talking about and put them into practice. When those ideas have been put into practice through the work that you all do at True Charity, Water Guarded Ministries, what have the results been? Oh, it's fantastic. So right now we have about 230 churches and nonprofits across 33 states who are part of our network. And we create hyper practical tools with the principles that we're talking about baked into them. But they are hyper practical.

How do I take my food pantry giveaway program and turn it into a food co-op? Or how do I develop a mentoring program instead of just a clothing pantry where I give clothes away? So we're developing model action plans and tool kits for organizational leaders to do those kinds of things. How do I measure outcomes? I've never done that before. But we need to measure our outcomes, measure our impact that we're having. And so right now we have about 62% of the organizations that have been with us at least a year who have made significant changes in the way they're practicing charity through our tools and training.

So we're on the road to helping really reform much of the private sector and how we're thinking about charity, poverty, and the human person. And my hope is when I come and talk with you at the Daily Signal that there'll be some policy leaders who will hear some of this and want to copy that kind of change at the legislative level. Yeah. As we're speaking, are there any names and faces that come to mind of folks that you've had the privilege of getting to work with and getting to serve and getting to empower that you think really articulate these policies in action? Well, you know, in the book, I share a story of a guy that I just love someone. much. His name's Charles. And Charles was once addicted, chronically homeless, came into our mission. We saw the image of God in him and began to work with him and understanding he had agency and purpose and potential. It came into our long-term program, graduated our long-term program.

We had a social enterprise at the time, which was mowing lawns. And so it was one of the ways that the guys in our program were working, you know, and so they would help with the lawn care business that our mission was running. We gave him the business. So now he owns the business and still maintains it to this day. And he also is full-time employed with the mission. Wow. Yeah.

So just a great story of empowerment, true empowerment that came through relationship, inspiration, as well as accountability and challenge. So for those listening who are thinking, well, my church has. has a ministry to the homeless or part of a rotary club that wants to do more about serving the poor in our community, where do they start? Come to our website. I mean, truecharity.us is going to be the place to go. And right from there, you'll find out events that are coming up that you might want to tune into. There'll be great articles that you can read. There's a way to join our membership and the tools and training are right there to help help you change the way. that you're doing charity. If people have heard something today that they go, oh, I wish I could do that,

our heart would be to serve them to make that change. Yeah. And I know that this book really provides a roadmap in so many ways for people to be able to pick it up and say, okay, you know, you've kind of experienced testing out so many things and what works and what doesn't. In some ways, you guys have made the mistakes for the rest of us so that now we can go ahead and jump in in our own communities. So for anyone listening, make sure you pick up a copy. of the book. What do you hope, number one, that folks take away as they read the crisis of

dependency? Well, I want them to understand the problem. Yeah. So sometimes it's, I think we see it, right, but it's maybe not articulated very well. So I want people to understand the problem. And to understand that this isn't just a problem for nonprofit leaders to solve. In fact, the last three chapters deals with the practitioner. So that would be the nonprofit leader, the church leader who's got a poverty fighting program, they're operating. But there's a whole chapter that deals with policy, too. How important policy is. And another chapter dealing with philanthropy. What are the right questions as a donor that I should ask? Like, how are you measuring your success? I mean, that's important. Are you receiving any funding or resource that ties your hands

from being able to practice true investigative, helpful charity? So these are kinds of of questions that I put in the book that I want to make sure philanthropists understand. There's the policy section, and then there's the practitioner piece. I think if we could get charity practitioners, public policy, and the world of philanthropy to come together around the ideas that I share in this book, we can truly be a part of making America great again. Yeah, critical. Well, James Woodford, author of A Crisis of Dependency, thank you for your time. As always, greatly appreciate the work you're doing. Great to be with you. Thanks, Virginia. We're going to leave it there for today.

Don't forget to hit that subscribe button. Do you never miss out on new shows from the Daily Signal podcast. Every weekday, catch top news in 10 right here in this podcast feed. Keep up with the news that you care about in just 10 minutes every weekday and go deep with us right here every weekend for the Daily Signal's podcast interview edition. And if you like what you hear, be sure to leave us a comment. We love hearing your feedback. and we're across all podcast platforms. So you can let us know if you like this show,

whether it's on Apple Podcast, Spotify, wherever you listen. Thanks again for being with us today. Have a great rest of your weekend. The Daily Signal podcast is made possible because of listeners like you. Executive producers are Rob Bluey and Katrina Trinko. Hosts are Virginia Allen, Brian Gottstein, Tyler O'Neill, and Elizabeth Mitchell.

Sound designed by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, John Pop, and Joseph Vons-Bakoff. To learn more or support our work, please visit DailySignal.com.