Why rigorous research is love.
Love is a force that often makes the impossible possible. It provides perseverance and grit, and it looks long-range at the wellbeing of the beloved. Love does not look only at what is right in front of us today, desperately holding on. It looks beyond ourselves and our relationship to someone, and it calls us to do what is right by them. Love looks at the whole picture, at the well-being of what may (even) outlast us.
This is the nature of our work at LEO. We ask ourselves, how do we best love the people we are trying to serve? How do we do right by them? What is the next step in order to live out this love in action? This is what we set about to answer each day we show up on campus.
The nonprofit industry has often quantified doing right by the number of night shelter beds filled or the number of people shepherded through well-meaning programs. And oh, how essential this is to embodying love in the moment. And then at LEO we ask, what is the next layer of love?
Millions in our country are caught in the relentless cycle of poverty and are offered untested solutions that fail to prioritize their experiences. If we stay in what is safe, but untested, do we undermine the value of the key players in the equation? Do we rob not only those in poverty, but ourselves, of critical information that could lead us to help even more people in even faster time, maybe forever? And what about the families and future generations of those we are serving today, do we ensure they are set up to be free from the same hardships of those who came before?
Oftentimes, we are approached about the nature of our rigorous research and asked in so many words, “what if instead of investing all this money on research projects, you just gave it to those in need instead?” Maybe that sounds like love to some. But to us, we see it this way: we love people so much that we cannot bear to stand by and watch as poverty repeatedly robs them of opportunity. We love our partner agencies so much that we want to test their innovative services so that they know for sure if their efforts are making a difference. For us, love asks tough questions because it expects and wants the best.
We can do better; we can love better. For LEO, rigorous research is the highest and widest use for good that we can provide to those living in poverty. We show this by refusing to operate in the dark when the stakes are this high for millions of people. We show this by our commitment to rigorous research as a means to a necessary end. We create and follow evidence so that we can break the cycle of poverty for good in a way that will stand the test of time, variables, locations, and more. This is what it means for us to love; this is what it means for us to do the next right thing for those living in poverty.
Thanks for joining us in loving better,
Heather
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