I was so lucky to be able to talk with Kurien Thomas on his podcast, SeroTunein, last month, a day after the attack on the U.S. capitol. Have a listen, or have a read of our conversation below, “Why we must do good in a society that’s hurting.”
Kurien Thomas: I’d love to learn more about how you got involved in the humanitarian sector. I read from your bio you’re a small town farm girl who is now an international do-gooder, so I just want to learn more about that journey.
Jennifer Lentfer: I was 19 and a college professor was offering a class called “Introduction to Development.” The professor had done her PhD on the education system in Zimbabwe, and was taking students to Zimbabwe. So I went and I was excited, because there was this opportunity to volunteer during the day, and then at night, we would meet and we would do faux strategic planning, really trying to understand the issues.
This was before voluntourism was a word. This is before there was a deeper awareness [among young white college students from the Midwest] of the harm that can be done, i.e. we’re gonna go build a school, and then everything will be fine. I think [my experience] wasn’t totally that, thank goodness, and we were with people who knew the context deeply, which made a huge difference. So thank goodness for that.
The other thing I will say about why I left though, is that I grew up in a really tough household. And so the thought of, “I can get on a plane and be as far away from [that situation] as possible”, that was real. The older I get, the more important I feel it is to tell that part of the story, because our deepest motivations about why we’re helping people are often not even known to ourselves.
I think that a lot of people who identify as “helper,” and that could be as a nurse, or a social worker, or…it comes from sometimes a wounded place in ourselves. That is not to say that that’s an invalid reason to be a helper. But it is important for us to be aware of that because there is potential for harm in the “helping” relationship. There can be deep power inequities between the helper and the ones being helped. And if we’re not aware of those, we end up perpetuating those power differentials and some of the more damaging aspects of that in our society, writ large.
Kurien: Right. And there’s that element of empathy that’s involved.
Jennifer: Yeah. So that just feels important to me to say. I don’t know that even five years ago I would have said, “I wanted to get away from my abusive father.” But I, but I do think it’s important. And, and I think that understanding has allowed me to create more empathy, expanded a capacity to understand why is this like this. It doesn’t need to be like this.
Kurien: I have a lot of friends that are interested in doing some kind of social work or pursuing some kind of high social impact career. And a lot of the times…they want to make sure that the future generation doesn’t have to go through what they’re going through. You’ve had a ton of experiences. Tell me a little bit more about how those shaped what you’re doing right now with your blog, how-matters.org.
Jennifer: As you’re describing about your friends, that instinct, that proclivity to want to not recreate that world again, is such a beautiful instinct. I think that’s why a lot of people get interested in the social good space.
You’ve mentioned the UN, and also I worked for a lot of international NGOs that are funded often by public funds from wealthy countries, and I worked in the philanthropy world for many years as well. However, the pathway in [to humanitarian work, public health, etc.] is very narrow, because this is an industry. I think people often in the beginning, myself especially, was a bit naive to that, i.e. the first jobs I was looking at [required] five years experience.
My first job was a fellowship with Catholic Relief Services, and it was specifically for people out of grad school who didn’t have five years of experience. I worked for Catholic Relief Services in Zimbabwe and Malawi. I worked for UNICEF in Namibia. All of these experiences in southern Africa made me understand how big the system is and how much money actually flows into these projects.
And being from a small town myself, I could always see it from this other angle. I could imagine strangers coming to town, because they were gonna help us. You welcome them in, because that’s the hospitable thing to do, and you listen politely. I can imagine joining the event at the town hall and listening with my neighbors, and then just thinking, “Oh, that’s really nice,” and then going back to your life. The outsiders are just not part of your reality.
From inside the [aid] system, I saw people not really attuned to that. There was a lot of saviorism. There was a lot of imposing of values and projects in top-down kind of ways. And I was always so I was always a bit critical of that. And the other part is that I had brilliant bosses who were “locals” and they were telling me the reality of this.
Putting all these pieces together, it was sort of natural that I became somewhat of a critic of international aid. I could see the waste. I could see what was being lost in the bureaucracy, even with all the good intentions, right? I don’t want to ever discount good intentions, but they are also not enough.
[Then I went to work for] a family foundation which was giving money directly to grassroots groups. That was some of the best work I’d ever done at that point, because we had a mandate to just get money to people who need it. As opposed to designing a perfect project, writing a nice, big proposal, moving millions of dollars. This was grants of US$5,000. I could see the change possible when you infuse a bit of money in something that’s already owned by the community. That should be our goal, [investing in] people who have an obligation and duty to each other that has nothing to do with me, the outsider. So I’m just coming in adding a little bit of momentum in the form of cash.
That was really powerful for me to have those two experiences of a big bureaucracy that was laborious and full of obstacles and hierarchies, and then this much more organic, relationship-based way of relating to the work. That’s how-matters.org got born. The economic downfall happened in the late 2000s, and the foundation’s assets started to shrink, and I lost my job. I had a severance package and a lot to say. And Twitter was new, and blogging was new in a way and I went for it. It was awesome. So many relationships have come from that period. It’s been amazing to see how having that early blog just allowed me to put those experiences together and make sense of things, put some ideas out there. And this little community started to form and here we are 10 years later.
Kurien: That’s amazing. You’ve definitely leveraged it as a platform to teach people about all the things that you’ve seen in the international international development space. There’s a wide range of topics related to how international aid workers should take care of themselves and take care of other people in the communities that they’re working in.
One thing that really stood out to me was this constant theme of being a do-gooder. Can you tell me a little bit more about what that means to you? What are the skills and expertise that’s required to be a do-gooder? What does that mean in the long haul?
Jennifer: Yeah. It’s so funny, because I recently had an old friend get really mad because I was referring to us in the sector as “do-gooders.” I am certainly curious about why that would be offensive. I feel like people who want to do good…are my people. Right? These are people who have a heart for other people, who really do want to manifest something beautiful in the world, heal things, imagine new ways of being. Those dreamers are definitely my people.
Like I said, that instinct is so beautiful. But to be a do-gooder means we actually have to wrestle with our own sense of our own goodness. This is to say that there’s so many ways we have been taught to be charitable, right? From a Western point of view, the paradigm is, if you have more, you owe people with less. And that immediately puts us in a hierarchical dynamic, in which I’m better, or I’m luckier. Superior.
Now generosity is never something to be sneezed at. But when that generosity continues to reinforce superiority, now we’re getting in the tricky stuff. Now we’re getting closer to white supremacy. Now we’re getting closer to economic disparities that we’ve got to highlight.
I think [the term] “do-gooder” reminds us that there’s a naïveté that we need to take seriously, that we need to be really mindful with each other. This [helping] thing is fraught and it’s actually not that easy to help people.
We can have the best politics in the world about how people deserve health care and education, and we can fight for that. And at the end of the day, people also have to receive options and make different choices. So both of those things are at play, and many other things are outside of our control.
So in the realm of making a change, our little piece of influence is actually quite small. Yet we’ve been given hero paradigm, that we are going to “save” the world. We gotta keep dialing that back down. So “do-gooder” reminds me that, “Yeah, I’ll do my [little] bit. And that’s what I get to do. And that’s okay.” It doesn’t have to be grand, but it does have to be sincere.
Kurien: Humility is something that’s a big part about being a do-gooder. Is that right? That’s what I’m sensing. The Savior complex is definitely a real thing. It’s about feeling good in the process of doing good, which you can, but it’s not about that. At the end of the day, it’s about filling a gap, filling a need.
I want to shift gears a little bit. This season, we’re focusing a lot about trauma. I’m sure being in the aid sector, witnessing trauma is inevitable. I mean, we were talking about abuse before, and this year has just been abuse to so many people. What’s your take on how individuals and societies must navigate trauma?
Jennifer: Wow, what a big, important question. And I’m so glad you’re asking it, because what Trxmpism has highlighted to me is that we’re just really bad at recognizing abuse when it’s happening – as individuals and as society. There’s all kinds of kinds of abuse, from interpersonal abuse to systemic abuse, and understanding the relationship between those is fundamental.
A lot of my work having to do with anti racism is informed by the work of Resmaa Menakem around racialized trauma. My understanding is that settler colonialism around the world basically divorces us from our humanity. Whether you’re the enslaver, or the enslaved, whether you are the indigenous person or the settler, there is a disconnection from our basic humanity happening in that historical transaction, and that gets transferred generation by generation within our DNA.
So sometimes, when you’re having a reaction to trauma, or in our very now developed world scenarios, someone taking away power from you, or someone is questioning your power, our bodies are reacting from a traumatized place. So it’s not just our trauma now, it’s our trauma through the generations. And that will blow your brain once you start to think about it and understand it.
And now it’s a really important time for us to now start to distinguish what’s trauma, and what’s harm, and what’s just natural, important conflict and disagreement. That also has to be part of how we live together. We’ve got to be able to build dialogue, and what trauma does is it interrupts our ability to be present with each other. That’s how it’s fundamentally disruptive.
In the do-gooder spaces that we’re in, in any sort of social change we want to be a part of, there’s a skill set that’s been developed that says, “You have to be good at making a budget in Excel, and you have to be really good at creating a reporting format.” What hasn’t been told to us is, “Oh, you’ve got to be really good at enabling dialogue. You have to be really good at sensing the room [and unearthing] what’s really at play here.” These are soft skills, which have been labeled as such because they have been labeled as from the feminine realm.
But listening, intuition, gathering people…these are the hardest skills to develop, because you have to put away yourself and really be present for others.
So for me, part of what we’ve got to be able to do is to name our traumas, and to do more healing work together, so that we can work together. These so-called soft skills are fundamental things. We have to learn about how to be together. And these skills don’t come from school. They don’t come from books. This is the life stuff that is actually quite important.
Kurien: How can people start applying those “soft” skills in their day-to-day lives? I mean, without having to go to another country?
Jennifer: And especially in this day and age when it seems like we’re so divided? And when international travel is not available to us right now? That’s not even an option in the foreseeable future. So that is a beautiful question. It’s one I’ve struggled with as well, i.e. why am I going “over there,” to support people when there’s need here?
I think you can always look out for where there’s need, and there is always need around you. Even if it’s not in your friends and family, it’s in your community. You can start there. And the most important part of the learning process is building relationships with people who experience life differently than you. That’s a fundamental skill. And, and then having a close enough relationship to ask for feedback, to have them mirror you, to ask them to guide you.
Sometimes my mentors are younger than me. This doesn’t have to be only sitting at the foot of the elders, which you should do. Don’t discount it. But also, relationships with people that grew up in a different kind of scenario than you did, and wanting to build an deep understanding of their lived experience and allowing them to reflect you to you. I mean, that’s what we’re talking about, and that’s where I think we can start anytime.
Kurien: I’ve got a I’ve got one more question. I want to know more about what you’re working on, or what you are looking forward to the most in 2021 as we navigate through this new year?
Jennifer: Thanks for that question. I’m really looking forward to imagination in 2021, and radical imagination which is based in revolutionary love. It means we get to think about all of this differently. We actually don’t have to have profit or money as the metric of success. We can add other dimensions to how we make decisions. And it’s actually quite necessary that we do that right now amidst the climate crisis, let alone COVID, let alone deep racial inequity, and injustice. All of these things are pointing us to really, really rethinking the fundamental underpinnings of all the institutions we’re a part of – our universities, our churches, our education systems. Name it – there is not an institution that’s not affected by all of these intersecting crises.
Part of even what I felt yesterday watching what was happening at the US Capitol, there were moments of deep shit despair. What will this now be? [We can no longer] bypass our reactions to collapse. Can we let ourselves also see the opportunity in it? We don’t have to do things the same. That’s what 2020 is teaching us.
So for me 2021 is revealing not only we do not have to do it the same…we cannot do it the same. That is actually not an option to go back, backwards. And this time, no matter who you are or where you are, I hope that you are asking the question of what is most important to you? And how do we care for that? And then how do we put that notion of care at the center of how we make decisions?
That [set of questions] to me is so tender, and exciting, and new, and requires the best of our thinking, the best of our imagination, and the best of what we can imagine for each other. That inclination to help has got to come back, but with a whole other view of how that could look.
It brings back notions of sharing. It brings back ideas of, “I’m not okay, unless you’re okay.” I am so constantly inspired by the mutual aid efforts that have grown, and continue to literally put that idea in action. It’s something that’s super hyper local, literally, “What does my neighbor need today? Can I be part of making sure they get that?” Wherever you are in the [U.S.], there is mutual aid happening. It’s just about plugging in. So much of beautiful work that I saw happening when I lived in southern Africa and when I work in other places around the world was work that was going to happen whether the international donors were there or not. That’s mutual aid: How are we going to keep hold of each other?
No matter the circumstances, people have found ways to survive despite the systems that have marginalized people from benefiting from them from time immemorial. There’s so much to learn from that, and to draw power and knowledge and wisdom from. That to me is the learning I want to do.
How do we be together, better? That’s what 2021 is about.
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Hi Kurien,
Thank you for that interview. It was a bit difficult to understand the transcript, but I really got a lot out of it, mostly in a philosophical sense. Reading this blog reminded me of my desire to start a blog of my own. It is something I have always wanted to do, but wasn’t sure exactly how to start. I certainly am inspired by your subject matter and style of writing.