Doing for others what they can do for themselves is charity at its worst. New technologies of charity must be developed to bring the dignity of reciprocity into the practice. We must come to deeply believe that every person, no matter how destitute or broken, has something of worth to bring to the table. And although the alternatives to one-way charity may be complex to create, this underlying belief in the necessity for every human to pull his full capacity will guide us toward healthy mutuality with those we would assist.
What is true for individuals is also true for communities. Loading a depressed neighborhood with human services, while at first pass may seem curative, may in fact be the very approach that keeps a community from rebounding. Doing for a community what it could do for itself is as damaging to community life as it is to an individual.
Further, the scale often required by serving institutions to operate cost-effectively may well require the importing of need from other communities. The last thing a struggling neighborhood needs is to have even more addicted, homeless, mentally ill or jobless people flooding into its streets. New technologies of compassion require us to rethink our economies of scale in order that our service becomes community-friendly.
In the following section we will delve more deeply into the underlying dynamics of serving and suggest some possible alternatives to the ways we have traditionally attempted to care for the poor.