Q&A: Rich Stearns of World Vision US on the role of advocacy, faith, persistence in development

SAN FRANCISCO — On Tuesday, Rich Stearns, the longest serving president of World Vision United States, announced to the staff of the Christian humanitarian organization that he plans to retire. Formerly the chief executive officer of Parker Brothers Games, a toy and game manufacturer, and Lenox, the brand known for its china, Stearns led the organization through dramatic growth with its annual revenues topping $1 billion. Shortly after the news broke, Devex caught up with Stearns by phone. As the World Vision board works with an executive search firm that specializes in Christian ministries to select a new leader, he will continue to lead the organization based just south of Seattle, Washington. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. The announcement of your intention to retire notes that this comes at an important time in the 67 year history of World Vision. The organization just saw its strongest growth in a decade. And the next president is tasked with reaching the goal of helping 30 million children by 2022. How were you able to achieve this kind of growth and what advice do you have for those similarly working to mobilize supporters around ambitious targets? Part of the answer is just good old fashioned marketing, sales, finance, business skills. I was a corporate CEO before I came to World Vision. And that’s probably more common today than it was 20 years ago. But I’d like to think I brought best business practices to the nonprofit world, raising the game in terms of marketing, branding, advertising, communications. The other thing I've learned that is very important is advocacy, but I mean that in a broader sense. It’s about more than just speaking to policymakers inside the beltway, but advocacy to the public. We need to invite the American public along with us, and we need to make the case for development. I wrote a book in 2009 called The Hole in Our Gospel, which really challenged and provoked Christians in particular to put their faith into action. The message was that God called us as followers of Jesus to change the world, not just to sing songs on Sunday. It was me taking the case for global development, caring for the poor, justice, and taking it to the Christian public at least in the United States. and trying to make the argument that you and your church need to be involved in this. Every time I get a chance to talk to the media to make the case for why this matters and why it's important, I try to do that. I think you've got to get outside the four walls of your building and really take your case to the public. You often have this image of the finger in the air politician. They lick their finger, stick it in the air, and figure out which way the wind is blowing. If they feel the wind of the voters saying “we need to help these people,” it shapes policy and affects votes. Right now I’m concerned the political winds are more “let's not think about the rest of the world. Let’s think about America.” I don’t like to see that. What’s good for the rest of the world in many ways is also in America's best interest. I was recently at a conference where someone had a quote: “We’re all better off when we’re all better off.” And I love that because I think it’s a great manifesto for development. We recently posed the question: “What role can faith play in innovation?” What is your view on the role of faith based organizations in meeting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals? For a lot of years, sometimes I feel like the global health and global development communities have kind of ignored faith-based organizations or have not considered faith-based organizations a part of the real global development community. Of course you feel a little bit bruised by that, because faith-based organizations were doing this kind of work long before CARE, Save the Children, Oxfam, USAID and others were involved with it, going back literally centuries. The faith-based community has centuries of experience in helping people in doing positive things. I often say to people that 85 percent of the world is profoundly religious in their worldview and the other 15 percent live on the East and West Coast of the U.S., Canada, and Europe. And so for a lot of the institutions and people trying to make the world a better place, there’s often been this worldview disconnect or philosophical disconnect from the actual values that are embraced by people in the developing world. Whether they’re Hindu or Muslim or Christian or Buddhist, they have a profoundly religious worldview. One of the great strengths of the faith-based community is our ability to speak a language that is readily understood by people of faith and faith leaders. People are often surprised to hear that World Vision works so well with Muslims and Buddhists and people of other faiths, but it’s because we share a religious worldview and they get us and we get them. That gives us entry and access to imams and priests and pastors, and those leaders have great moral authority in their communities. If you're trying to eradicate polio and you’re trying to vaccinate against polio in Northern Nigeria, you better work with faith leaders. I would also say that poverty is more than just material. It’s not just a deficiency of things or knowledge. Poverty is also shaped by community values. There’s a spiritual, a cultural, emotional dimension to poverty. Faith traditions have a lot of answers to life's challenging questions that sometimes help in the development process. We have a program called Empowered World View. We work with smallholder farmers. The curriculum takes them through “Who is God, who are you?” And we talk about being made in God's image. We say you are children of God and because of that, you are filled with God-given potential. God created you to be innovative, and smart, and creative, and you have this ability and agency within yourself and within your community that can be unleashed. And in some of these societies where they feel so hopeless, this is incredibly good news and such a hopeful worldview that you can do this. Then it gets into community values of caring for one another, loving your neighbor, making sure there is a safety net for the poorest in your community, those values help in the development process and help accelerate development. You left corporate America to join World Vision U.S. following what you describe as the calling you felt from God. And since then, one of the things you’ve become known for is mobilizing the church to respond to the global AIDS pandemic. Can you talk about other challenges you have faced and how you’ve overcome them, and what lessons that experience might hold for other NGO leaders? The refugee crisis in the Middle East in particular has been a very difficult issue to get traction on with the American public and also with the Christian public. “It’s about persistence … Keep picking yourself up and moving forward. Keep talking about it and convincing people. It’s not just one speech you give in one place. You’ve got to take it with you.” --— Rich Stearns, president, World Vision U.S. For whatever reason, and I have some theories on why we have a lot of apathy mixed with fear, we have not really embraced how do we, as a country, help these 12 million internally displaced people and refugees coming out of the Syrian conflict? This is a problem to overcome. For about the last four years, everywhere I go, I speak about refugees. I’ve preached in dozens of churches. I've gone to Christian conferences. I've gone up on Capitol Hill. I’ve talked to the media. And I’m just like a broken record. I just will not stop provoking people to care, and building my case about why we need to care about refugees and why this is important to our humanity, but also our national interest. It is an opportunity to demonstrate the values of American people to the world, including parts of the world where we are not always the most welcome or the most embraced. It’s about persistence. You can get really discouraged in this business because you don't feel people care about the issue you care about. But just be persistent. Keep picking yourself up and moving forward. Keep talking about it and convincing people. It’s not just one speech you give in one place. You’ve got to take it with you. It starts with your own organization. When we really embraced the refugee crisis at World Vision U.S., even my staff were not all on board. They were busy were doing all kinds of things. You’ve got to bring your own team on board and take your case to anybody who will listen and even some people who won’t. Be encouraged. I look at where we were with all the data and statistics of poverty in the year 1998 when I came to World Vision and where we are today. Child mortality has been cut in half, literacy is at record highs, malaria has been reduced. The number of people living under $2 a day, the number of people with access to clean water, all of those statistics are going in the right direction. What that says to me is our collective work and excellence and passion is making a difference. It can be very discouraging to work in this field, because you deal with a lot of human suffering, and at any given moment it seems horrible. You have to stand back and look at the long arc of the trend and it’s just very encouraging. It’s very satisfying for me to say I put in 20 years and I did my part and I can see the difference it’s made in the world. But it’s all of us. It’s government, NGOs, faith-based organizations, houses of worship, volunteers, the United Nations system, the multilaterals, economic development in China and India, and other developing economies. It’s a combination of so many things. But together it is a very formidable army, not to conquer the world, but to improve the world and to change the world.