Use commerce to empower the poor, community development workshop is told

from the Kansas City Star

Outside of the Atlanta Braves baseball stadium sits a bright yellow eatery serving some of the best Southern cooking 'you'll ever curl a lip around.'

But Bob Lupton did not come to Independence on Tuesday -- at the invitation of Maywood Baptist Church and other organizations -- to brag about his hometown cuisine.

He highlighted the Tummy and Soul restaurant to illustrate the heart of the message he delivered to roughly 120 people gathered at the church: Traditional forms of giving can demean the recipients and only provide short-term relief to the poor.

Or, as he put it during his half-day community development workshop: 'One way charity communicates very subtly: 'You have nothing of value I desire in return. Accept my pity and be grateful.' '

The Tummy and Soul is a self-sustaining enterprise started by people who at one time relied on food handouts. Lupton said the idea for the restaurant emerged when his church stopped offering free food, creating instead a food cooperative in which members pooled money to purchase groceries.

Lupton, who is president of FCS Urban Ministries, has spent nearly four decades working to improve inner-city Atlanta. He is also an author and consultant to churches around the country.

He spoke Tuesday in the heart of an area still savoring an electoral victory that earlier this month transferred seven schools from the Kansas City School District to the Independence School District -- a unified effort that has prompted calls for more cooperation in other neighborhood revitalization efforts.

But his message was also directed at inner-ring suburbs and metropolitan areas dealing with problems like crime and poverty.

Lupton also addressed the issue of suburbs' dealing with low-income families pushed out of areas, like downtown Kansas City, that are gentrifying. He said one suburban church in his area was looking into buying an apartment complex that could provide affordable rental units to such families.

Overall, he said, commerce is a terrific way to empower the poor and restore their dignity.

For instance, his organization runs a clothes store that is an outgrowth of a thrift shop it started years ago. It offers low-price, donated clothes, but they are not sold at token prices. The proceeds are used to keep the store running.

'Instead of dispensers of charity,' he said, 'we became a merchant. They come through the doors as customers; we need them. We need their dimes and dollars -- and they sense that.'

Dreaux Sawyer, interim pastor at New Bethel Church in Kansas City, Kan., and Stacy Evans, pastor at Gregg Tabernacle AME Church in Kansas City, attended the workshop. They agreed it's possible to implement Lupton's philosophy locally.