Today’s post is wisdom from Barbara Deal, which she wrote and shared at a retreat in 2017. (Note from Tanya: I have had to postpone my trip to Kenya due to the precautions around COVID-19. This message from Barbara about trusting and letting go seems particularly relevant today.) I’m realizing that nearly everything I’m sharing with you is another way of talking about trusting God.  In order to become truly one-pointed, and put the Yearning for the Kingdom of God first in our

This post is an update from Barbara Deal, SIA Board Member, on her experience at the SIA Small Business Fund Coordinator Conference last week in Eldoret, Kenya. Dear Companions in Spirit, Greetings from Eldoret, Kenya! The conference for the Spirit in Action Coordinators ended last night. Attending were six Coordinators for the Small Business Fund in Uganda, Kenya, and Malawi. Each work with and mentor between a dozen and almost 200 small business project partners. SIA local

As you may have heard or seen, the SIA website was hacked yesterday. I got a dreaded email from Google warning me that the site would temporarily be marked as hacked until I got it cleared up. Yikes! And so two hours passed in the blink of an eye as I tried to figure out what I needed to do and how to do it… I’m pretty tech-savvy and there are still moments with the website where I feel like I’m in the deep-end trying to stay above water. I told this to my husband and he reas

My work with Spirit in Action is not only about “making the world a better place” and running the daily operations of an organization, but also about struggling to understand how each of my interactions can bring more peace and equality into the world. This means constantly striving to put myself in another person’s shoes. That might sound like either a lofty goal, or a throwaway promise. Yet, if I can keep this goal in the forefront of my mind, I am reminded to honor the dig

A friend of SIA with 50 years experience employed on the executive and administrative sides of church, parachurch and humanitarian foundations, muses on the value of risk, accountability, and the occasional failure in investing in people and projects world-wide: When I asked Tanya about on-the-ground accountability for SIA grant funds in the places where people have the least resources, I was thinking of several experiences in our foundation work which looked like failures at

How do we decide whom we support? This is quite a different question from how you choose proposals; it is a question about the core values of the organization. It was a thoughtful question, one that I am still thinking about weeks later. Of course, these are just my thoughts, and perhaps, other SIA Board members would have different ideas. I think the simple part of the answer goes back to last week’s post. We support people we trust. And we actively work on building trust wi

At SIA we say we believe in building trusting relationships with our international partners. So what does that really mean? I read this blog post recently about trust by Ben Ramalingam on his blog Aid on the Edge of Reason about international development and aid. [Thank you to Jennifer Lenter for bringing this post to my attention!] Ben has some interesting points about the many aspects of trust – how trust is an evolving process, relies on equal exchange, and has many differ