Rejoicing our Communities Through Generosity:

Stories to Inspire and Guide

Theological Reflection & Stories By Dr. Amy L. Sherman

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About Dr. Amy L. Sherman Dr. Amy L. Sherman is a Senior Fellow at the Sagamore Institute for Policy Research, where she directs the Center on Faith in Communities. Named by Christianity Today in 2012 as one of the 50 most influential Evangelical women in America, Sherman is the author of six books and nearly 100 articles in a variety of periodicals including First Things, The Public Interest, Policy Review, The Christian Century, Christianity Today, and Books & Culture, as well as various online platforms.

Sherman works closely with Made to Flourish, a pastor’s network for the common good focused on issues of faith and work. Her most recent book, Kingdom Calling: Vocational Stewardship for the Common Good, was awarded “Book of the Year” status in the Christian living category by CT. Her articles appear regularly in MTF’s Resource Library and on The Green Room, a blog sponsored by the Theology of Work Project.

Sherman is the founder and former executive director of a Charlottesville Abundant Life Ministries, an urban ministry in Charlottesville, VA. She served for several years as a volunteer Senior Fellow with the International Justice Mission. She is a long-time member of Trinity Presbyterian Church. She earned her B.A. in political science at Messiah College and her M.A. and Ph.D. in international economic development from the University of Virginia. Her life verse is Micah 6:8 “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”

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Contents Rejoicing our Communities Through Generosity: Stories to Inspire and Guide ....................... 3

Nourishing East Ohio Street: Chef Nikki Heckmann ...................................................................... 4

Reflection & Discussion Questions .............................................................................................. 5

“La Gran Madre” of Miami: Nora Sandigo ...................................................................................... 6

Reflection & Discussion Questions .............................................................................................. 7

A Public Interest Architect: Jill Kurtz .............................................................................................. 8

Reflection & Discussion Questions…………………………………………………………...……..9

From Former Home to “Family House, Inc.:” Cordelia Taylor ……………………………….10-11

Reflection & Discussion Questions ......................................................................................... …11

Tools & Resources

In every story included in this bible study, there is a “Giving Style” attributed to each woman

featured. To prepare for discussion, it is suggested that all participants take the WiserGiving Quiz.

The quiz will provide each person with their personalized “giving style” as well as additional

context for discussion.

WiserGiving Quiz: What’s your giving style? How do you like to solve problems? How does this

influence your approach to philanthropy? Find out by taking the WiserGiving Style Quiz (TM)

at infaithfound.org/womengive.

This series of bible studies reflects contributions from a diverse group of women. Each is written

to inspire discussion regarding women and their contributions both in biblical and current times.

InFaith Community Foundation is grounded in the Christian Tradition of serving others.

Rooted in a Christian faith that is welcoming, InFaith serves donors of many denominations, faith

traditions and diverse theologies. We celebrate God’s grace and live out our faith through giving

that creates positive, effective and lasting change throughout our shared community.

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Rejoicing our Communities Through Generosity: Stories to Inspire and Guide Proverbs 11:10 describes a recipe for producing profound joy and transformation in both Christians engaged in whole-life generosity and in the people/communities they serve. It proclaims: “When the righteous prosper, the city rejoices.” The word “rejoice” in Hebrew connotes the ecstatic celebration that arises in a community that’s been oppressed, and then God overthrows the enemy and sets everyone free to flourish. Proverbs 11:10 rejoicing is a dancing-in-the-streets gladness prompted by the genuine transformation of people’s lives.

In Hebrew, the word “righteous” is tsaddiqim (pronounced: saw-de-keem). It describes a people deeply passionate for God who are devout doers of justice. When the tsaddiqim prosper, they don’t see their blessings as a means of self-enrichment. No, they know that every dimension of their prosperity—their wealth, gifts, knowledge, and networks—is meant to be stewarded for the common good. The tsaddiqim generously deploy their assets and vocational power strategically to advance foretastes of the Kingdom of God, telling and demonstrating the Good News. Because of their generosity, their neighbors and communities begin experiencing much greater levels of beauty, peace, intimacy with God, joy, wholeness, justice, and flourishing. Because of how they steward all that they’ve been blessed with, individuals, families, workplaces, cities, and the creation itself experience healing and blessing.

We all have opportunities to live as the tsaddiqim, through the intentional and generous deployment of our time, talents, and treasure. The stories below paint pictures of women living as tsaddiqim, blessing others through their generous stewarding of the gifts, skills, and assets God has given them. As you read them, consider:

▪ What gifts, skills, and vocational experiences has God endowed you with that could be leveraged to make a positive difference for your neighbors, coworkers, and/or community?

▪ What problems in your community, city, or the world most concern you—to the point where you want to be part of the solution? Is there a specific population (e.g., single moms, victims of sex trafficking) that you feel God calling you to serve with the gifts He has given you?

▪ How do you want to invest the financial blessings God has given you? Are you drawn to organizations that serve individual directly or to those doing research to identify best practices or advocacy to mobilize social change?

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Nourishing East Ohio Street: Chef Nikki Heckmann Giving Style: Maximizer Becoming a Christian was a major turning point for Nikki Heckmann, and she wondered aloud with her pastor whether she needed to go to seminary, so she could learn how to work in the church. He told her that if she thought God was calling her to seminary she should pursue that. But, he added thoughtfully, “Maybe you should consider first what it could look like to be a Christian chef.” His answer was a relief: Nikki admits she had no desire to go to seminary. Her two big passions are cooking and loving on people who don’t yet know the love of God. With the help of her congregation, Alleghany Center Alliance Church (ACAC), Nikki launched Bistro 2 Go in 2007. It’s an eclectic cafe in the heart of the Northside neighborhood of Pittsburgh that she—and the church—call home. Over her career, Nikki had helped to open numerous restaurants. This, however, was a risky financial venture. Locating in a neighborhood with visible drug dealing, on a lot with no parking, her expectations for sales at the Bistro were low. But Nikki was following a call. She says she “wanted to really change East Ohio Street’s economy, so it can thrive and be a place for families to come to.” Nikki worked long hours and didn’t take a salary for a long period during the start-up phase. Her focus was on creating delicious food and good opportunities for people in the community who needed jobs. Nikki felt that she had been a recipient of God’s mercy (She laughingly refers to herself as the younger brother in the Parable of the Prodigal Son). Opening the café was a practical way she could follow her calling to serve the neighborhood and express her unique vocational skills and experiences. The Bistro has done well, and its success has enabled Nikki to open a full-service catering firm. Between her two businesses, Chef Nikki has created over 40 jobs. She gets good patronage from ACAC members and a lot of word-of-mouth advertising. Chef Nikki’s multiple ways of giving back to the neighborhood have also encouraged patronage. The Bistro offers free cooking classes teaching moms on limited budgets how to prepare healthy meals. To uphold local nonprofits, Nikki offers a 10% discount on catering, allows local organizations to use the Bistro’s community room for free, and promotes their work through special events. She also partners with the city to hire inner-city teens for summer jobs. The Bistro is accomplishing Chef Nikki’s aim to transform her corner of Pittsburgh. Other businesses on East Ohio Street have perked up their storefronts. “When my building looks beautiful,” she says, “it raises the standard for others.” Plus, the high foot traffic into the Bistro has intimidated local pimps who’ve moved their prostitutes elsewhere. “When you bring light into darkness,” Nikki enthuses, “the darkness leaves.”

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Reflection & Discussion Questions

• Is there a specific problem, group, or place that you sense God has called you to? What is it?

• What in your background or life experiences do you think accounts for why this particular calling has engaged your heart/passion?

• How have you responded to this call?

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“La Gran Madre” of Miami: Nora Sandigo

Giving Style: Supporter, Campaigner

Being a good mom requires sacrificial generosity. Imagine if you were “mom” to over 1,200 kids! Nora Sandigo from Miami is a mother who loves God and children. Not just her own two daughters, but also children known as “immigration orphans.” These are U.S.-born children of undocumented parents who have been deported. Now in her 50s, Nora began becoming the legal guardian of such kids in 2009. Today she is the guardian of over 1,200 youngsters. She’s earned the nickname, “La Gran Madre” (the great mother). Nora, 53, has a special heart for these children because she herself fled to the U.S. without parents as a teenager from war-torn Nicaragua. She knows what it is like to be separated from her parents. As she told one journalist earlier this year, “I understand these kids so much because, even at 16 years old, I still felt vulnerable. I still needed the guidance of my parents, their warmth, their hugs and their blessings.” Nora provides security for these children by becoming their legal guardian and helping them to get placed with their relatives and so avoid the foster care system. Parents who fear they may be deported sign documents giving Sandigo power of attorney. This enables her to stand in their place as needed—picking up kids from schools or immigrant detention centers, representing them at hospitals, escorting them as they board international flights. Nora is also an activist in immigration reform. She is seeking to pass laws to protect the parents of these children from deportation, to reunite families, and to ensure the full citizenship rights of the orphans. Nora does this work as a volunteer. Her paid jobs include running a plant nursery and an elderly care home. Her husband Reymundo, a rancher, supports her work with the immigrant families. Together they’ve made many personal sacrifices to care for them, hosting luncheons and “family fun” days at their home and spearheading drives for needed food and clothing. Two “immigrant orphans” actually moved in with the Sandigos for six years. Nora uses her skills as a mom and her social networks to spread the word about these kids’ needs and to gather the things they need to thrive. This is her calling, her vocation. And through it she is bringing these children foretastes of the security and justice they will enjoy one day in the New Heavens and Earth.

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Reflection Questions

• Sometimes love means truly taking responsibility for another person. In a culture that values autonomy and personal freedom, willingly entangling our lives with the struggles of others is challenging. Have you ever had someone outside your immediate family “take responsibility” for you? Who was it? Talk about how it felt that you were not alone because of their willingness to engage with you.

• Nora and her family have made big sacrifices to serve vulnerable children. Thinking back on sacrifices you have made to serve others, what things helped you to find the strength and willingness to give even though that generosity was difficult?

• What sorts of habits or disciplines do you think help us to persevere over the long haul in loving generosity toward others?

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A Public Interest Architect: Jill Kurtz

Giving Style: Maximizer, Engager

Jill Kurtz still remembers the moment at 12 years old when she decided to become an architect. Sitting in her father’s office (he was a building contractor), she found a house-planning book amidst the waiting room magazines. She took it home that night and using gridded paper, totally re-did one of the floor plan designs. “I changed the walls around and decided this was going to be my dream home someday,” Jill laughs. “And if I wanted to build it, I knew I needed to be an architect.” At architecture school at Kansas State University, “I decided I wanted to use my profession in a way that would help people and was environmentally responsible,” Jill says. She became the school’s first student to achieve the Leader in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification. Upon graduation, she took a job with a “green” design firm in San Francisco and worked there 18 months honing her skills. But she was troubled by the extremely high costs that were routine in her profession. Traveling as a volunteer architect on short-term missions deepened her awareness that many in our own country and around the world need good design services but cannot access them because they’re so expensive. So, Jill dedicated herself to becoming a “public interest” architect. She and a like-minded friend launched their own small green design firm that provides affordable architectural services for nonprofits, small businesses, and churches who cannot pay the big firm prices. “At reBuild Consulting we’re making sustainability accessible for people who can’t afford high-end consulting,” Jill says. reBuild’s first local clients were two newly minted dentists who wanted to implement sustainability through their entire practice. With reBuild’s help, the dentists reduced their building’s standard lighting power by 25 percent and improved its air quality by 30 percent by increasing the outside air ventilation. At age 30 Jill returned to her alma mater and convinced them to bring her on as an adjunct faculty to teach a new course on “public interest architecture.” Her desire is to transform the field of architecture by influencing future generations of architects to think outside the box about the deployment of their skills, so that more people can benefit from them. Professor Kurtz reports happily that she’s had students tell her, “This class has changed my life. It’s restored back to me why I came into this profession to begin with: to help people.” “My intent was to open these students’ eyes to the larger role in society they can play,” Jill says. “Designers and builders have the power to holistically address some of humanity’s most critical issues. [Yet] only 10 to 20 percent of the world’s population has access to designers and architects. Rather than catering to the world’s wealthiest, we need a reorientation in the profession toward serving the needs of the other 80 to 90 percent.”

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Reflection Questions

• Generosity certainly involves our money, but as Jill’s story shows it also involves decisions we make about how and where to invest our skills and vocational talents. Think of an example of a particular skill you have (from a profession or a hobby) that you have used to serve others.

• Generally, who benefits from your deployment of your unique skills and gifts? Are there other people or places with greater needs that you could also begin to serve?

• Jill’s passion to see design services become more accessible to everyone who needs them has led her to try to influence the field of architecture itself through her teaching at Kansas State. Do you have a younger friend or colleague whom you could try to influence, educate, or cast vision with so that someone in the next generation will share a passion that you have?

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From Former Home to “Family House, Inc.:” Cordelia Taylor

Giving Style: Guardian In 1989, Cordelia Taylor and her husband, James, sold their home in the Milwaukee suburbs and began renovating the old duplex in the inner city where they had raised their eight children. Taylor, a nurse who’d grown tired seeing the poor-quality care some elderly residents in nursing homes received, had decided she’d open her own facility. She admits that she began with faith “and not much else,” but knew in her bones that everyone regardless of their economic status, needed to be treated with respect and love. After months of navigating bureaucracies for the necessary permits and overseeing the remodel, Cordelia joyfully opened Family House, Inc. to eight new senior citizen residents. The only criteria for residents are that they must be 55 or older, not violent, and not using drugs or alcohol. As she told a local journalist, “If they meet those criteria and we have room, we take them. Lack of money is never a stumbling block.” Since residents pay only what they can, (which often isn’t much), finances have typically been tight. Cordelia herself didn’t take a salary the first five years. The ministry relies heavily on grants, volunteers, and prayers, but accepts no government funding. Nonetheless, over the next two decades, Family House Inc. gradually acquired and renovated neighboring properties. At its height the ministry served nearly 60 residents and created over 50 jobs for neighborhood residents. Family House is all about dignity, personal care, and community, Cordelia says. As she told M Magazine, “If the facility is home-like, people are happy. Here, people sit at the table and talk after they eat. There’s no bedtime until someone asks, ‘Will you help me get ready?’ When we grocery shop, we ask residents what they would like to eat.” For Taylor, providing the best quality care for the community’s most vulnerable residents has also required at least two other keys: a holistic approach and perseverance. To achieve the first, Cordelia forged a partnership with the Medical College of Wisconsin to open a free medical clinic on the block. Knowing the mutual benefits of cross-generational relationships, she also started an after-school program in which neighborhood children share dinner weekly with the seniors and work alongside them in tending Family House’s flower and vegetable gardens. Cordelia, 75, has shown a gritty resilience in persevering for decades through the challenging circumstances of local crime and drug activity, financial pressures, and vandalism. She credits her grandfather for his inspirational modeling of persistence. Joe Thompson lost his son Renzo, Cordelia’s father, to the vicious violence of the Jim Crow south in 1947.

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Somehow his Christian faith enabled him to forgive and carry on. Cordelia says her grandfather taught her that if she carried hatred it would end up harming her more than the people she was hating. She says it “took a long time” for that to get down into her heart, but eventually she realized he was right.

Though other black children in her community were typically kept home during cotton-picking season, Cordelia’s grandfather cleared a path through the woods, so she and her five siblings could get to school without being seen. She says he valued education and knew it was the ticket out of poverty, “He drove us children to and from school and was so proud when I graduated from nursing school and my sister became a teacher.” Cordelia passed along Joe Thompson’s values of service, sacrifice, and hard work to her own sons and daughters, and was delighted when six of them decided to join her in the ministry at Family House.

When asked what she wants others to learn from her life, Cordelia says: “All of us have gifts. If we put our gifts to work, and have faith in God, we can make changes not only in our own lives, but in the people's lives around us.”

Reflection Questions

• Cordelia’s faith has enabled her to take big risks of generosity, selling her home and moving into a decaying neighborhood to bring hope there. Where in your life could you take a small risk to practice your faith?

• At the heart of Family House is the commitment to people’s God-given, inherent dignity. Sometimes our charitable efforts, though, can fail to respect others’ dignity. Have you seen that occur? What steps can we take so that our own efforts to serve the poor will not inadvertently be demeaning?

• How are you leading with that in the world? What does vocation mean for you? Are there others you would suggest?