Where Christian faith gets down to business
T&M creates food processing jobs in a Senegalese village
Nigerian PR firm boosts youth, women in agriculture
Word of mouth is winning formula for Steinbach serving dish company
ASSETS at 30
Helping Lancaster startups become investment-ready
Passion may be a common character trait among successful entrepreneurs.
Still, the level of commitment that Tina Ephraim and Moulaye Biaye demonstrate in their efforts to create jobs in rural Senegal is impressive (see story, page 6.) They left careers in industry and banking in Europe to set up a rural food processing company. This, in a country where bankers view entrepreneurs with suspicion. That challenge is definitely not for the faint of heart.
Yet MEDA supporters who visited their factory in early May believe they have a winning formula.
The same drive and missioninspired passion are evident in entrepreneurs such as Bushra Fahier (Story pg. 17). Fahier’s definition of business success for her Flavors of Morocco hospitality firm is unusual. She wants to sponsor Moroccans to join her in the US. She is content to sometimes work from 9 am to 11 pm in pursuit of that dream.
For Jaime Arroyo, CEO of the ASSETS Lancaster program, business dreams also center around helping others. He wants more women, Puerto Rican, and other BIPOC (black, indigenous, and people of color) entrepreneurs to gain business financing (Story, pg. 20).
Arroyo, married with a young child, has a lot on his plate these days. Last fall, he was elected as a Lancaster city council member. .
Readers may wonder about the progress of companies that compete in MEDA’s annual pitch competition.
One of the winners at the 2022 competition has springboarded from
that success to a $1 million prize.
Diana Orembe from NovFeed won $10,000 at MEDA’s convention in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in early November. NovFeed, a Tanzanian firm, produces a biotech solution that uses bacteria to create a protein-rich fish feed from organic waste.
Tanzanian fish farmers currently spend 70% of their production costs on pricey feeds like soy and fishmeal.
The NovFeed process delivers feed at a lower cost that is affordable for farmers. Its product reduces waste and cuts carbon dioxide emissions.
In May, NovFeed won the first-ever Milken-Motsepe Prize in AgriTech. These multiyear awards aim to advance technological progress toward the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
NovFeed won the $1 million grand prize for its proprietary technology to upcycle organic waste. It makes nutritious, sustainable, and traceable plantbased protein ingredients and concentrated natural biofertilizer for the food system. The Milken Institute announced the win at a conference in Los Angeles.
In a LinkedIn post, Orembe described the award as a validation of NovFeed’s efforts. “Our team of passionate professionals is working tirelessly to develop cuttingedge solutions that reduce the environmental impact of farming
while increasing farmers’ yields,” she said. .
Small businesses in Haiti are overwhelmingly small, informal, and cash based.
Those are among the findings of a FinScope survey of the owners of more than 5,300 micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs).
The study was funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and conducted by Diagnostic and Development Groups SA (DDG) in 2022.
MEDA, which oversees the USAID-funded project ATTEINDRE, was a member of a reference group for the project. ATTEINDRE, which means “to attain” in French, is a five-year, $12 million effort focusing on economic growth activity tied to resilience.
Ten percent of Haiti’s estimated seven million adults own a business. Of these businesses, only 11 percent have employees, and only 11 percent of owners have registered or licensed their firm.
Ninety-five percent of businesses surveyed are of the micro variety, with less than five employees. Only 1.8 percent are medium-sized, with more than 20 employees.
Business owners do not see or understand the benefits of formalizing their operations.
Only eight percent of businesses even keep financial records, and 99 percent of customers pay cash.
Study recommendations included formalizing MSMEs and digitizing payments toward a cashlight economy. It also recommends improving access to and usage of financial services and enhancing business resilience. .
10
Features 12 17
Sharon Idahosa knows that it is difficult for women and youth to prosper in the Nigerian agri-food sector. Her company, Let’s Talk Agriculture, is trying to change that situation.
By Femare OkemenaBushra Fahier never imagined making her living in the food industry. But she is thriving with two Lancaster locations and working to help others from her homeland immigrate.
During a recent Senegal visit, German MEDA supporters gained new perspectives on African entrepreneurs and MEDA partners in its AVENIR project. 20
Jamie Arroyo gave up a career in banking to head ASSETS Lancaster. Now he has plans to expand that organization’s reach, to teach women and BIPOC entrepreneurs what bankers expect to see when approached for loans.
Shorter good reads
22 Roadside stand
24 Soul Enterprise
22 Books in brief
Our company focuses on excelling at our core focus and maximizing our current production capacity rather than focusing obsessively on growth and expansion.
This chapter, “Habit 6,” is excerpted from Darren Shearer’s new book, The ChristCentered Company: 37 Biblical Business Habits to Build a Thriving Company That Honors God and Blesses the World.
The book discusses real-world best practices and practical biblical commentary for all 37 “habits” surveyed in the accompanying Christ-Centered Company Assessment. That assessment enables firms to measure the extent to which their company culture and habits are consistent with biblical teaching.
The Christ-Centered Company was published in May by High Bridge Books.
For who has shown contempt for the day of small things?
Zechariah 4:10
Let your eyes look directly ahead and let your gaze be fixed straight in front of you.
Proverbs 4:25
You were faithful with a few things, I will put you in charge of many things.
Matthew 25:23b
Having failed to practice “pure and undefiled religion” during the midfirst millennium B.C., Israel was forced into Babylonian captivity. During the invasion, the glorious temple built under Solomon’s leadership had been destroyed. Having practiced social injustice and idolatry, Israel was found unfaithful with the Promised Land and the temple God had given to them. Their unfaithful stewardship of what God had entrusted temporarily prevented them from participating in God’s blessings.
Following Israel’s return to Jerusalem after their exile in Babylon, a second temple was built for God, yet the older generation was not satisfied with it. The Bible says,
“The old men who had seen the first temple, wept with a loud voice when the foundation of this house was laid before their eyes, while many shouted aloud for joy” (Ezra 3:12b, emphasis mine). Due to their contempt for the foundations of this smaller, second temple, Israel abandoned construction of the temple for five years.
In response to those who looked upon the new temple with disdain, God questioned them, “Who despises the day of small beginnings?” (Zech. 4:10) They should have focused on honoring the Lord with what they had rather than focusing on what they didn’t have.
Like the elders of Israel, have you ever been so focused on what you and your organization have not yet achieved that you began to neglect and lose sight of what God had already entrusted to you?
If you’re like most of us, this is an ongoing struggle. Solomon exhorts us, “Let your eyes look directly ahead
and let your gaze be fixed straight in front of you” (Prov. 4:25). Stay focused on faithfully managing what God has entrusted to you today.
Define your core focus and embrace God’s optimal growth rate for your company.
Defining your company’s core focus is your first defense against bright, shiny opportunities that can woo your and your team’s attention away from the primary stewardship God has entrusted to your company. In Good to Great, Jim Collins refers to this core focus as a company’s “hedgehog concept,” which is derived from an ancient Greek parable called “The Fox and the Hedgehog.” A line from the poem states, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Collins encourages business leaders to define a “hedgehog concept” by finding the intersection between your company’s answers to the following questions:
• What you are deeply passionate about?
• What you can be the best in the world at?
• What best drives your economic or resource engine?(i)
After experiencing tremendous success in commercial painting (i.e., their hedgehog concept), Hasson Painting decided to enter the construction industry but shut it down within two years. Owner and CEO Bob Hasson said,
“It wasn’t our niche, we
weren’t good at it, and we were spending way too much time on it. We had more problems with that construction division in two years than in 40 years of focusing on commercial painting. For as long as that division was active, we were off focus from our core competencies.”
Stay laser-focused on delivering your core competency and value proposition to your customers. When the master in Jesus’ “Parable of the Talents” returned from his journey, he said to one of the two diligent stewards, Well done, good and faithful slave. You were faithful with a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.
(Matt. 25:23)
As you stay faithful in managing your core focus, watch how God increases your company’s stewardship at the optimal growth rate God wants for your company. This optimal growth rate might not be as fast as you’d like it to be, but it will be better for everyone involved than growing too fast, which often results in diminished quality of service, overspending and over-hiring to keep up with the growth, and painful staffing cutbacks later.
Focus on getting better, not bigger. Chick-fil-A’s first major competitor, Boston Market (then known as Boston Chicken), was preparing to launch an aggressive growth strategy that involved opening hundreds of new restaurants. The threat posed by Boston Market became a major topic in the Chick-fil-A board and executive meetings. In a reactionary panic, Chick-fil-A’s leaders began to counter Boston Market with an aggressive expansion strategy of their own. However, this strategy would require the company to take on a significant amount of additional debt.
As former Chick-fil-A Chief
Marketing Officer Steve Robinson shared with me in an interview on the Theology of Business Podcast, Chick-fil-A’s sagely founder Truett Cathy walked into the executive committee meeting at 80 years old and was asked for his thoughts on the matter. He said,
“I don’t think a guy who just turned 80 years old ought to have $250 million dollars in debt on the books. Slow down. I want to get out of debt.”
According to Robinson, Cathy’s refusal to take on additional debt forced Chick-fil-A to live within its means and focus on getting better before getting bigger.
The focus on getting better is at the heart of making disciples. That’s why the entire fast-food industry and many other industries look to Chick-fil-A as a model of quality, customer service, and innovation. In effect, Chick-fil-A is discipling the fast food industry and beyond.
Jim Collins discovered in his research of companies that made the extraordinary leap from good to great, “Not one of the good-to-great companies focused obsessively on growth.”(ii) Unlike mediocre companies Collins and his team studied, the good-togreat companies focused on doing a few things extremely well. As a result, like the faithful steward in the Parable of the Talents, they were entrusted with even larger responsibilities.
Don’t despise the day of small beginnings. Focus on getting better, not bigger. As you get better at your core focus, your customers will see to it that you become bigger so you can serve more of the people they care about.
• What is your company’s core focus?
• Is it a struggle for you to focus yourself and your company’s leadership team more on getting
better than getting bigger?
• What pace of growth is optimal for your company? .
Darren Shearer is the founder and director of the Theology of Business Institute, which helps marketplace Christians explore and apply God’s will for business. He is the host of the Theology of Business Podcast and Houston Christian University’s Christianity in Business Podcast Darren has authored five books, including Marketing Like Jesus: 25 Strategies to Change the World and The Marketplace Christian: A Practical Guide to Using Your Spiritual Gifts in Business. He is also the founder and CEO of High Bridge Books & Media.
(i) Jim Collins, “The Hedgehog Concept,” https://www. jimcollins.com/concepts/the-hedgehog-concept. html.
(ii) Jim Collins, Good to Great (New York: HarperBusiness, 2001).
Volume 53, Issue 4
July August 2023
The Marketplace (ISSN 0199-7130) is published bi-monthly by Mennonite Economic Development Associates at 532 North Oliver Road, Newton, KS 67114. Periodicals postage paid at Newton, KS 67114. Lithographed in U.S.A. Copyright 2023 by MEDA.
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Subscriptions: $35/year; $55/two years. Published by Mennonite Economic Development Associates (MEDA). MEDA’s economic development work in the Global South creates business solutions to poverty. MEDA also facilitates the connection of faith and work through discussions, publications and conventions for participants.
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T&M is based in a small village in rural Senegal.
But its founders have big dreams of exporting their products and creating rural jobs.
“When we first met, we both had a vision of returning to Africa to contribute to rural development,” Tina Ephraim says of the company that she and her
husband, Moulaye Biaye, founded in 2019.
They met in 2011 when they were students in Toulouse in the south of France.
Ephraim, originally from Ghana, has a chemical engineering doctorate and significant industrial experience.
Biaye has a master’s degree in
MEDA has been active in Senegal since 2019. Its current project, AVENIR, runs until June 2026.
AVENIR is a French word that means future. For MEDA, it is an acronym that stands for Adaptation and Valorization of Entrepreneurship in Irrigated Agriculture in English.
The $19 million project is funded by $18 million from Global Affairs Canada and $1 million from MEDA and the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT).
The project aims to improve farming households’ socio-economic wellbeing and resilience in Senegal’s Tambacounda and Sedhiou regions.
The project focuses on directly benefiting 11,500 women and youth, including creating decent work for 6,941 individuals.
The project focuses on four agricultural value chains. These are: cashew, mango, baobab and rice.
Senegal’s population is 18.1 million people. Its population is young, with a median age of 18.5 years. Over half the population is rural. The World Bank estimated that about 36.3 percent of the population lived in poverty in 2022, earning less than $3.65 US (just over 2.209 Senegalese francs) a day.
While Senegal is one of Africa’s most politically stable nations, it is vulnerable to environmental shocks. Droughts and floods are expected to increase in scale and duration due to increased climate variability. These challenges place added burdens on small farms, which already struggle with land overuse, a shorter rainy season, and soil degradation challenges.
Small-scale farmers in Senegal have limited knowledge of climatesmart agriculture and irrigation practices. They often have little access to improved inputs, technology, and land. These challenges make it difficult for women and youth to make profits from their labor. .
This issue and the September issue of The Marketplace magazine feature stories and photos about the Avenir project gleaned from a recent visit to Senegal.
finance and applied mathematics. He worked as an investment banker in France for six years.
“Based on our competencies, we realized there is so much potential in rural areas to engage in industrialization,” Biaye said.
He grew up in a farming family in Senegal’s southern Baconding region. That background gave him
a real knowledge of the agricultural products that come from the area.
When they started T&M, the main area that they wanted to focus on was valorizing (enhancing the price of) cashews.
They knew that cashew nuts were generally being exported without value being added locally.
Worse, in Ephraim’s mind, is the fact that about 90 percent of the cashew’s mass is unused and thrown away.
She knew that juice from the cashew apple — a small bulbous receptacle that looks like a pepper — is delicious and nutritious. The juice has five times more Vitamin C than orange juice and contains a lot of magnesium. “It is considered
a superfood,” she said.
Ephraim formerly worked as a technical director of a factory in France. She turned her engineering background to a pressing question: How to extract cashew juice in the most efficient, ecologically sustainable fashion and stabilize the juice. One of the reasons people weren’t processing cashews to make this higher-value product is that the juice ferments quickly.
Another challenge was removing the tannins — a chemical found in certain foods, such as fruits, vegetables, nuts, wine, and tea — from the juice. Removing tannins is important for product storage stability and consumer acceptance.
“For about two years, we
developed a process of making the cashew juice.”
Testing in the local market found acceptance of the product. “We realized there is a huge potential to industrialize the production.”
In 2021 they built a factory in the village of Baconding to produce and sell cashew apple juice on an industrial scale, under the Casadeliz label.
They next turned their attention to mangos. “Eighty percent of the mangos we see around here are not even exported” due to an issue with flies that put parasites inside the mangos and prevents them from being consumed, she said.
Those flies cause tremendous amounts of losses and agricultural waste. T&M wanted to find a way to process mangos to have as much value as possible.
They set up their factory in the village because they knew the area suffered from an exodus of young people who moved to larger centers due to security issues and a lack of opportunities. “That has a huge impact economically.”
A 30-year civil war in the area from 1982 until 2014 devastated many families. “We felt a moral imperative to return and contribute to the boosting of the economy.”
T&M aims to contribute to the area’s socioeconomic development by taking foods previously treated as waste and transforming them into value-added products.
Biaye wants to avoid the Western world’s practice of locating factories in big cities, which results in rural depopulation. “We believe in a new African model … which puts a lot of emphasis on the campagnes (countryside), which is where you find the authentic culture of a whole country like Senegal. If you come to the campagnes, you see what the country is made of.”
“We really believe that we can champion this model. We are successfully doing it here; we would like to be able to copy it in other countries,” he said, naming Ghana and Ivory Coast as potential markets.
MEDA is partnering with T&M as it works to transform Mango nut waste into compost. T&M
is receiving a matching grant to purchase a de-pulping machine, an industrial dryer, and equipment used to produce mango butter.
Research has shown that the pulp from mango nuts contains
fatty acids that are good for the skin and the hair, Ephraim said.
Balanta Cosmetics, another T&M brand, is working to extract these oils for use in the cosmetics industry.
The cosmetics are sold in France and internationally, mainly via e-commerce.
T&M pays 240 local women to harvest mangos within a 10 km radius of its factory. They are paid for each kilogram of fruit that they collect.
A three-year project aims to employ 65 more women initially, and another 200 by the end of the third year.
Women are generally under-represented in the mango value chain, she said.
T&M gets them to pick up mangos that fall every day so the nuts can be extracted before they become contaminated with flies. The issue of value add is “first of all an environmental one,” she said.
Reducing fly populations in the zone will greatly increase the yield of commercial mangos.
Mangos collected by women are brought to the factory and cleaned so mango butter can be extracted from the nuts.
Eleven staff currently work at T&M’s factory. The addition of a mango butter processing line will create three additional jobs. Ephraim hopes that employment from that line will grow to between 10 and 15 within three years.
“The reason for that is, we are a research-oriented company,” Biaye said. “We start small, we prove the concept, and then we scale.”
“We felt a moral imperative to return (to Africa) and contribute to the boosting of the economy.”T&M produces and sells cashew apple juice under the Casadeliz brand.
There have been challenges along the way.
A public perception that cashew juice is a fermented product is a problem in a predominantly Muslim nation, where alcohol is taboo. Others believed that drinking cashew juice would kill them.
T&M spent two years ensuring that their product contained no alcohol and then a year working to change public perception. That included having Muslim leaders drink the Casadeliz product in public.
Soon, the company had a different issue, keeping up with buyer interest. “There’s a lot of demand compared to the amount we are producing,” Ephraim said. “It’s been pretty positive, but we feel there is a lot we can do to reach as many people as possible.”
Hiring an experienced commercial manager has helped the company sell its juice in supermarket chains.
Potential investors from Luxemburg, Germany, and France have approached T&M about joint ventures, but none offered terms acceptable to the founders.
A German entrepreneur wanted a white-label product that would obscure its origins. But T&M wants to prove that “African manufactured products can go and sell everywhere without having to suffer any kind of prejudice,” Biaye said.
A prospective French investor wanted worldwide exclusivity (including Senegal) for selling the product, so those discussions were short-lived as well.
In 2022, the company sold 25,000 Euros (just over $27,000 US) of its Casadeliz juice late in the year after sorting through many issues in getting its plant up and running.
This year, Biaye expects they
will sell 150,000 Euros (about $161,000 US) of its pasteurized juice. The firm’s new production line can produce 1,000 liters of juice per hour.
He said that T&M’s expansion strategy includes setting up similar facilities in surrounding countries such as Ivory Coast, Benin, and Ghana with local partners to produce its Casadeliz brand.
T&M developed a mango juice formula last year, then started manufacturing and commercializing the juice in 2023 under the Casadeliz label.
Production of cashew wine for export could be a long-term product, Ephraim said.
She said that the company has already made cashew cider and knows others that have made cashew wine. “It’s very delicious and has a very interesting flavor to it.”
Sixty percent of mangos grown in Senegal are wasted because flies inject larvae into the mangos. Mangos that are exported to the Western world are inspected at the port. If even one mango fly is found, an entire shipment is rejected.
T&M has a mango pulp extractor in its factory to extract the mango nut (core) from healthy mangos.
The mango nut is used to make mango butter that can be used in cosmetics. Balanta Cosmetics has five products, including hair shampoo and skin moisturizers.
She also hopes to be able to produce renewable energy from husks of the waste cashew hulls and shells, using an anaerobic digester to make electricity. Her Ph.D. thesis was on that topic.
“Ideally, we will be moving towards a zero-waste process,” Ephraim said.
The company promotes its products on Facebook, Linkedin, and Instagram accounts. Rather than the company name, it focuses on the Casadeliz and Balanta Cosmetics brands.
Getting financing for expansion is a difficult challenge, Biaye said. Lenders charge 10 to 15 percent interest and require borrowers to pledge assets as collateral greater than the amount of the loan. For a $25,000 loan, a borrower would need to pledge $30,000 in assets, he said. “It’s quite a journey.”
Bankers are not businessfriendly, Ephraim said. “Entrepreneurship, for them, is high-risk and long-term, so for them, they don’t find an interest.”
One of the challenges is that credit history information, commonly used in North America to assess a borrower’s creditworthiness, is not available in Africa, he said. . Balanta cosmetics are sold internationally.
For Ben Horsch, visiting MEDA’s AVENIR project in Senegal has given him new perspectives to share with his friends, family, and neighbors back home in Germany.
One of the key narratives he plans to share about Senegal is the need for a shift in European perceptions of Africa.
“The way Europeans think about Africa is quite different from the reality,” he said.
Horsch will tell people about meeting committed entrepreneurs who are working to create jobs.
“The difference is … we saw people that were well educated. Those entrepreneurs that we saw here, they knew exactly what they want. The biggest problem for them is access to capital.”
“Success will come. They will do it.”
Horsch was part of a group of 15 people who visited MEDA
project sites in early May. The group included three Germans, 11 Americans, and two Canadians.
The group had the opportunity to meet several MEDA clients, including two food processing firms, a horticultural co-op, and a rice demonstration farm.
For Ben Horsch’s wife, Agnes, the Senegal trip was the first time that she had visited a MEDA project.
“I knew about the problems here (in the Global South),” she said. “But to see it was another thing.”
A farmer’s wife whose parents were farmers, Agnes Horsch did farm field labor as a girl. That helps her to understand some of the challenges facing small-scale women farmers. “The organization of these (small-scale Senegalese) farms will change,” she predicted.
“They need credit. They need systems.”
Bernhard Landes, a farmer and renewable energy systems developer, agrees. He was impressed by Moulaye Biaye and Tina Ephraim (see story, page 6), a young couple that left good jobs in Europe to create jobs for others in rural Senegal. “They come back, basically in the middle of nowhere, and start this business. They take their own money and invest it.”
He was also struck by the commitment shown by a man who started a business processing baobab nuts with no capital backing and has built it into a substantial enterprise, providing jobs for rural women.
MEDA is partnering with both of those firms, providing access to capital that will allow them to purchase equipment to expand and create more jobs. “That’s the right way to (partner with) somebody,” Landes said.
The Horsch family have been longtime MEDA supporters. Ben Horsch recalls his father, Dankwert, a MEDA board member in the late 1970s, talking about MEDA many times as he was growing up. “It was always present in my mind,” he said.
When Ben Horsch was younger, he was interested in development work. He traveled to several parts of the world to see the work of a number of agencies, which he prefers not to name. What he saw left him frustrated.
“My conclusion, what I saw, was that all that those boys did was not a help for people in those countries. They caused more trouble in those countries, or wasted money, or whatever. Their job was in vain. It was just for nothing.”
He is much happier with MEDA’s business-oriented approach. When entrepreneurs succeed, “it will be a big benefit for the region, and the people,” he said.
The Horsch family foundation regularly supports MEDA. That support will continue through the next generation, he said. .
Sharon Idahosa is the total package, a young, beautiful, intelligent, and proactive businesswoman. In her own words, the ingenious Edostate-born entrepreneur is feeding “the neglected child,” which is agriculture.
Her entrepreneurial journey began when she sought ways to help combat starvation issues in Nigeria during the COVID-19 pandemic. Major stakeholders rejected her.
Determination spurred her to keep developing herself before growing her business. It can be challenging for a young woman to make her mark in agriculture, a traditionally male-dominated sector of society. Still, Idahosa is a successful, visionary leader who educates, trains and empowers smallscale farmers and youth in Nigeria.
Idahosa, 27, has a Bachelor of Science in agriculture and extension education services.
She wanted to become an industrial chemist and never planned to study agriculture, but life had a different plan for her.
Today, she heads Let’s Talk Agriculture, a public relations firm, and is involved with two other agriculture-related firms.
Agricultural exports provided much of Nigeria’s trade in the 1950s and the 1960s. But the agriculture sector was neglected after the country’s oil boom.
Nigerian governments, at both the federal and state levels, have often allocated less than five percent of their budget to agriculture.
In fact, a January Nigerian news report indicated that for 2023, only 1.11 percent of the total national budget was allocated to agriculture. This runs contrary to the 2003 Maputo Declaration by African heads of state. They agreed that 10 percent of budget spending should be allocated to agriculture and rural development policy implementation in their respective countries within five years.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Idahosa was disturbed that many people could not afford three meals a day. To address this problem, she founded the non-profit LIFEX Agricultural Initiative in 2020. LIFEX’s goal is to support women and youth in agriculture. It provides women and youth with business training and workshops on micro-credit projects. “Supporting smallholder farmers has been an amazing journey,” she said.
In February, Idahosa spoke at the Global Council for the Promotion of International Trade EU’s sustainable business summit. Her talk focused on how to drive a global food system transformation.
She believes we should understand the food system to know its importance. “We all play
a major role in the food system. When we are talking about the food system, it involves the production, processing, and distribution of food, with the sole aim of reducing hunger and malnutrition.”
She said the pillars of a food system are access, availability, utilization, and stabilization. But numerous challenges confront small-scale farmers, she said.
These include the lack of infrastructure, poor roads, transportation, how to manage food storage, food loss, and waste.
Small-scale farmers are major contributors to the agriculture sector but need to earn a decent living from their toil. Idahosa believes that the standard of living of these farmers should be a priority, as they produce food for the nation. “They are the backbone. Once we do this, [support them] it becomes easy to build our food system,” she says.
In Idahosa’s February 4th blog post, Five Reasons Youths are not Attracted to the Agricultural Sector, she mentions that youth are not interested in studying agriculture. They see it as a poor man’s occupation.
Youth aspire to take up careers in medicine, accounting, engineering, and law. She decided to enlighten the youth about prospects in the agricultural sector.
“There is a stereotype that
agriculture is for the poor. Farmers are not poor,” she says.
She encourages youth to be part of a value chain. A youth could go to a poultry farm, pick up the feathers from the birds that would otherwise be discarded, and have the feathers processed and made into throw pillows.
Another possibility would be to buy eggs from a poultry farm and resell them, which requires less capital than starting a farm. A youth could decide to use eggshells to make ceramics or convert the eggshells to garden fertilizer for sale. Others might decide to sell fish, she said.
Idahosa dreams of establishing an e-learning academy. It would offer courses that would empower
small-scale farmers, and Nigerian youths to be self-employed. She believes in creating career opportunities in the agricultural sector rather than waiting on the government to allocate a percentage of the budget. In her own words, “The youth can always pave their way for a great future without dependence on funds from anywhere,” she says.
At the same time, she thinks the government should create an enabling environment for small-scale farmers and youth to thrive. She said that government policies need to be revisited to ensure that farmers or youth who want to set up a business are not held back.
The lack of infrastructure is
another issue that needs to be addressed. Idahosa believes the government has the capacity to give agriculture a greater priority.
Idahosa recalls visiting a major stakeholder in the agricultural sector with her business plan in order to partner with them. She was told they only work with large organizations, not small businesses. This sort of experience is enough to discourage an enthusiastic youth or small-scale farmer.
She encourages farmers and youth to invest in themselves by accessing free resources, programs, and mentoring. She used this approach to thrive in the industry.
Idahosa runs her business with a team of five. She also partners with several other organizations. Agro Market Square is a businessto-business platform that connects small-scale farmers to industrial buyers. SkillEd is an e-learning firm that facilitates collaboration between organizations. AgriCode Expo engages youth in climate-smart agriculture and empowers women to access technology to advance their agricultural productivity.
“Youth are setting up agricultural technology to help support small-scale farmers,” she said.
“Despite the challenges of corruption, lack of machinery, funding, and infrastructure, farmers and the youth still need support so they can advance,” she said.
“We cannot wait for the government to solve all the problems, which could take a while,” she says.
In her mind, education and community effort will produce faster results and progress.
Idahosa hosts the Let’s Talk Agriculture podcast. It covers subjects such as food and nutrition, post-harvest loss, climate change, and technology. The podcast can be heard on various platforms. .
It was just 15 seconds of airtime. But that changed everything for Melissa and Evan Funk.
In April 2020, the Funk’s company, Lynn and Liana Designs of Steinbach, Man., was taking off. Orders for their unique, eco-friendly cheese boards and serving trays were coming in fast from stores across North America.
Then the pandemic hit. As stores closed across Canada and the US, orders dried up.
“I didn’t know what we were going to do,” said Melissa, 27, the company’s CEO. “It was a scary time.”
A few weeks after the pandemic shutdown started, the company was featured on the Good Morning America TV show’s Deals and Steals spotlight.
Lynn and Liana owners are (l-r): Mike Cancade, Melissa Funk, Evan Funk, Candace Cancade
The segment was just 15 seconds of airtime on a weekly feature that highlights products from across North America. But they sold 4,000 cheeseboards after it ran.
“It saved our business,” she said. “It saved all our jobs. There were no layoffs.”
That timely appearance is just one of the many breaks — or
“blessings,” as Melissa calls them — the company has experienced since it started in 2018.
The breaks have included appearances or mentions on The View, CTV, the Golden Globes, in Forbes Magazine, and in a gift bag at the 2021 Grammy Awards.
Their products were also used for a special gift basket for celebrity mothers such as singers Carrie
Underwood, Meghan Trainor, and Katy Perry, rapper Nicky Minaj and actor Mandy Moore.
Trainor became a big fan, buying 70 cheeseboards for the cast and crew of her TV show Top Chef Family Style. She went on to showcase them on her Instagram and Tik Tok channels, garnering about 50 million views.
“Those were such huge things for us,” Funk said. Those mentions come about through word of mouth, attending trade shows, and by pitching their products to various media and organizations. “When it works, there’s all that free advertising.”
So far, everything seems to be working well for the company, which was founded by the Funks and Melissa’s parents, Mike and Candace Cancade.
Taking the name from Melissa’s and her sister’s middle names, Lynn and Liana’s Designs started in their home. Today it employs 30 people in the small southeastern Manitoba city, turning out unique cheese boards and serving trays made of acacia wood imported from Indonesia.
What sets their products apart from others is their environmentally friendly design and manufacturing. They use a soybean epoxy developed by entrepreneurs at the Oak Bluff Hutterite Colony, located about 70 kilometers from Steinbach.
“They take what was once a waste product and turn it into a resin that is easy on the environment,” said Evan Funk, 29, who is Lynn and Liana’s financial manager.
When they first learned about the resin — what the Oak Bluff Colony creators call “ecopoxy” — it was being used for art applications. “We wondered, why not also use it for kitchen purposes?” he said. Soon after, the company was born.
At first, Lynn and Liana used social media to spread the word about their products locally. But then, a store in New York City heard about them and ordered six boards. When those flew out the door, they ordered more. Soon, other stores heard about the products and started ordering.
Today, their products are sold through a network of over 2,000 stores in the US, Canada, Europe, and the Middle East, and directly to customers. Last year, the company sold over 100,000 boards and serving trays.
“We just started by posting on social media, and it snowballed from there,” Melissa said.
She said that the firm is strategic about attending trade shows and following leads that could lead to further promotion and sales.
“Our approach is to say yes to opportunity and not be afraid to take a risk.”
The couple, who have two daughters aged five and three, weren’t dreaming about starting a
kitchenware firm. But they were interested in owning their own company. “I always wanted to run my own business,” said Evan. “I wanted to be in control of my own destiny.”
It helped that they come from entrepreneurial families. He grew up working for his father, who owned Earl’s Meat Market in Steinbach. Her parents were always “involved in one business or another,” she said.
At first, Melissa wasn’t even all that interested in getting involved. She had just gone on maternity leave from her job at Farm Credit Canada and was planning on being a stay-at-home mother for a while.
“But soon, I started taking on
a leadership role, and I really enjoyed it,” she said.
Neither of the Funks has business degrees — or any university degrees, for that matter.
“Our goal is to find the right people, create the best team, always be learning, and don’t be afraid to ask questions,” Melissa said.
Faith is an integral part of life for the Funks, who attend Crossview, a nondenominational church in Steinbach.
“Sometimes Christians separate faith and business, but for us, everything is spiritual,” Evan said. “Our whole life should be an act of worship, including our work. We want to invite God into everything we do.”
Melissa agrees. “Everything about our story revolves around our faith,” she said. “Our Father in Heaven has given us so many blessings through this company. Now we want to pass them on.”
One way they do that through the company is by operating in sustainable ways.
“God called us to be stewards of the earth and steward it well,” said Evan, adding that they want to leave the world a better place for younger generations. “God created the world and wants us to treat it well.”
“We care about the earth and making beautiful products for the home,” said Melissa, noting the company partners with organizations in both the US and Canada that replant trees and fight deforestation.
Overall, they are both “pretty blown away by where we are now, how blessed we are,” said Melissa. “We are proud of what we have done. We believe we have something of value to offer people. It’s growing beyond our wildest dreams.” .
“When it works, there’s all that free advertising.” — Melissa Funk, CEO, of Lynn and Liana DesignsEnvironmentally friendly design & manufacture set Lynn and Liana's products apart
The morning coffee chat at fast food restaurants may be an endangered species, Fast Company magazine reports.
US chains, including Burger King, Taco Bell, Chick-Fil-A, Dunlin, KFC, Panera, Chipotle, and Popeyes, have announced no-seat stores. The move allows companies to spend less on buildings.
But the trend worries AARP spokesman Rodney Hamel. Surveys conducted by the lobby group have found that seniors like to socialize at fast-food restaurants.
“Fast food restaurants are informal community centers,” Hamel said. I’d have (an) equal concern if you took away religious institutions or libraries — all of those have a social (benefit) to them.” .
Board games are more than a way to while away a rainy summer afternoon.
Canadian Business magazine suggests that sales are expected to hit almost $27 billion by 2027. Settlers of Catan, a game released in 1995, has become one of the most popular modern games. More than 32 million copies of the resource collection game had been sold as of 2020.
Board games pre-date modern civilization. The oldest discovered board game pieces date back to the Bronze Age, 3100 BC.
The industry is one of the largest categories on the Kickstarter fundraising platform. Upwards of 39,000 projects are currently looking for capital. .
US readers of The Marketplace may know Russ Eanes for his work as a pastor, or as the first CEO of the MennoMedia publishing firm.
What they may not know is Eanes’ post-retirement work as an entrepreneur. As a New York Times article explains, Eanes has self-published two books and started a business helping other writers publish their books. During the pandemic, he hosted book presentations online, as well as teaching classes on writing, selfpublishing, and technology.
Post-pandemic, he is planning to start leading trekking tours in Europe. A fitting enterprise for a man whose first book was about a pilgrimage hike on the Camino de Santiago in Spain. .
In the early 1990s, MEDA decided to see if it could apply lessons learned from helping small businesses internationally to assisting North American entrepreneurs.
The ASSETS (A Service for Self-Employment Training and Support) program resulted from those discussions. In mid-1993, MEDA hired Howard Good as director of domestic economic development and manager of the first pilot project.
The program grew to a dozen chapters at one point, mostly in the US but also in Mexico City, Mexico, Vancouver, British Columbia, and Kitchener, Ontario, Canada.
MEDA spun off these chapters as the organization decided to refocus its energies on its international
work. In 2008, as funding for community development programs dwindled, MEDA “reluctantly decided to phase it out” and quit actively creating new ASSETS programs, an article in the MEDA News publication reported.
Today only two ASSETS programs remain: in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Toledo, Ohio.
ASSETS Lancaster, which was incorporated as a 501 (c ) 3 (non-profit) organization in 1996, celebrates its 30th anniversary this year.
In this issue, The Marketplace magazine profiles two hospitality businesses that have benefited from ASSETS assistance, and the organization’s president, Jaime Arroyo’s vision for ASSETS' future focus.
When Bushra Fahier immigrated to Canada from Morocco in 2010, she had no plans to start a business.
Living in Hamilton, Ontario as a single mother with two children, she had trouble finding work in her profession. She has a doctorate in physics, but Canadian institutions only saw this as equivalent to a master’s degree.
She remarried in 2011 and moved to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 2017. Her future career got its start in Canada.
Not finding a Moroccan community, restaurants, or grocery stores in Hamilton, she tried to create Moroccan-themed parties and events to share that culture. “The passion, it came with the love of my country.”
Through those parties, friends encouraged her to do
catering. Fahier resisted. In her culture, working in hospitality and cooking was seen as a step down.
But as people kept calling her to do catering, she relented. She also sold her food at farmers’ markets and special events. “It got popular.”
After the move to Lancaster, she decided to continue event catering. Working from home, the first event she did was a sell-out success, and phone inquiries continued.
In 2018, she opened a storefront at a farmers’ market in Lititz, a nearby community. She had loyal customers and built up a database over two years until the COVID
pandemic in 2020 shut down the market.
Her family moved to a 250-yearold abandoned farmhouse. Fahier
did French and Arabic translations to make ends meet.
Former customers called her, saying they missed her food. Fahier replied that she had no space to prepare food for them.
“One time, a lady just showed up in my kitchen.”
Seeing dinner cooking on the stove, the woman asked if she could have some. Then another customer showed up.
Fahier relented and started cooking in her basement. Customers did a GoFundMe campaign for her, sending her $3,500. That money allowed her to work on basement wiring and making a proper kitchen.
ASSETS heard about her efforts and provided a $5,000 grant that allowed her to finish the kitchen.
In January 2021, she began advertising a takeout MoroccanIndian fusion menu. Once the weather warmed up, people began asking about having picnics in her backyard.
“I told my husband, maybe we have to do something nice for people to sit down.”
They built a gazebo in the backyard, including tables and cushions on the floor. Word of mouth spread quickly.
“By June 2021, I’ve got people lined up on the stairs, waiting for a place to sit.”
Her sister, who lives in Oklahoma, and several other friends started helping out. As business increased, they began buying chairs, tables, umbrellas, and other furnishings.
Fahier took an online training course. Then she got a $10,000 grant from ASSETS.
By the fall of 2021, customers were showing up from neighboring states. Customers asked her what she would do in the winter.
ASSETS asked if she would apply to become a vendor at
Southern Market. The new market manager, and two other people who she didn’t know were chefs, came to her home to try her food.
“They loved it, and the manager told me — ‘we would be happy to have you.’”
Flavors of Morocco opened at Southern Market in January 2022. “Since then, I am ranking first at the market” in terms of sales and return customers, Fahier said.
After opening at Southern Market, she took bookkeeping and financial management courses from ASSETS, “and they are still helping us.”
Mike Mason, ASSETS chief program officer, is not surprised by Fahier’s success, or her claim of being the most popular stall at the Southern Market. He said Flavors of Morocco has higher price points than other vendors and virtually no
competition in its niche.
More significantly, he credits Fahier’s marketing abilities. She “spends a lot of time developing her customer base,” he said. “She’s really savvy with her business.”
With the market restaurant up and running, Fahier decided to re-focus her backyard enterprise to a Moroccan experience. Late last summer, she began offering reservation-only meals where people sit on the floor and enjoy five or six courses. Groups typically ranged between eight and 40 people, but she did a ladies’ night for 70.
Her business goals go beyond making money. She is just starting her first application to sponsor others to come to the US.
‘I am focusing on what I want, my plans, my future. Leave (other concerns) to God.” .
Her children were too young to know it, but Jessie Tuno’s career in the hospitality sector got its start because of them.
Tuno, a 23-year veteran of Lancaster, Pennsylvania’s restaurant industry, says that journey was “borne more out of necessity than desire.”
She and her husband had two small children and found daycare extremely expensive. She worked at a Panera bread restaurant from 5:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., and her husband worked three to 11 so one could always be at home with their children.
At that job, she met a former chef who sparked her interest in the food industry “and the passion he had for food.”
That was a major change for someone who confessed that she “could not cook to save my life” when she got married 26 years ago.
After working at Panera for three years, she took a part-time job as a food coordinator at her church, Worship Centre, a nondenominational mega-church in Leola (a small community in rural Lancaster County).
That job taught her many
important lessons. Doing a breakfast for 200 men, she learned that when eggs are put in an aluminum foil pan, they turn green. “That was really a disaster, but it pushed me to learn more about what I am doing and why I am doing it.”
Tuno went to culinary school and graduated at the top of her class. At age 30, she was the second-oldest student in her class. “That was one of the best decisions that I ever made, going to culinary school and getting an education behind what I was doing.”
She worked at several independent restaurants in Lancaster, everything from fast food to fine dining, banquets, and catering. In 2018, she returned to the school she had graduated from, as a teacher. She became the culinary and pastry arts program director two years later, right before the pandemic hit.
The pandemic experience changed the programs in good and not-so-good ways. It also helped her understand her interests and different parts of the industry. “I love teaching, I love bringing people up.”
She has often told students that they will either really love or hate their work. “If you’re in the industry just because it’s a job, you won’t last very long.”
“This restaurant industry is not for the faint of heart. You really have to love what you’re doing.”
In 2021, Lancaster’s Southern Market announced they were looking for vendors for its food hall. “I knew I wanted to be part of it.”
Tuno viewed setting up a business in the market as a safe space to step out into something she wanted to do “with some (protective) bumpers.”
One of the bumpers is that the landlord, Willow Valley Communities, provides all of the equipment for her shop.
She pays for that equipment
through a percentage of sales. “It gives you that freedom to be able to put a menu together, really prove that concept.”
Tuno has helped to mentor other vendors in the hall. Her teaching experience has given her the knowledge to answer new entrepreneurs’ questions.
Her business, Butter and Bean, is a coffee shop that also offers fresh pastries. Tuno has been working as the pastry chef since a former employee found another job.
Butter and Bean just opened a second location, a café in the Tanger Outlets mall, five miles from the Southern Market. Creating that
24-seat space has been a “whole other journey” without bumpers, as she worked with contractors and electricians.
Her husband, who recently lost his job, has been working with her in the new café. “That’s another one of the God moments… He knew what we would need.”
ASSETS has been tremendously helpful in her business journey, she said. “I genuinely feel like they want us to succeed.”
When she had business issues that she wasn’t sure about, she was able to bounce questions off ASSETS staff.
Tuno took a 10-week financial
boot camp offered by ASSETS for market vendors in early 2022, soon after the food hall opened. She already had some sense of what she needed to do in terms of profit and loss statements and cost of goods.
The program gave her lots of ideas about labor and “really digging deeper into (the) cost of goods.”
With food costs post-COVID going sky-high, she said deeply exploring the question of “how can
we make money?” is key.
“With this being your money coming in and going out, it makes it that much more real.”
Tuno has changed her prices three or four times over the past 15 months, keeping things as stable as possible. “I keep things seasonal.”
Without ASSETS’ help, “I don’t think I would have made it. Especially in that financial aspect of things. I don’t think that I
would be as confident opening our second location as I am without (training).”
At the Southern Market, Tuno has two staff, sometimes three on weekends. Her new location will have eight to 10 staff. Finding the right people has not been easy.
“We’ve had a lot of people put in applications, we get through a phone interview, and then they just disappear.” .
Jaime Arroyo’s initial career goal was to do well in the financial services industry.
Son of Puerto Rican immigrants, he was the first person in his family to attend and graduate from college. He worked in the banking industry for a decade.
“I thought I had my career pretty much set as far as, you know, where I was going to go. I had a great professional job at an office,” he said. “I was doing very well financially.”
But that work exposed him to “the barriers that existed for folks from our (Puerto Rican) community to actually access capital.”
Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, is likely most well-known for its Amish farmers and the surrounding tourist industry. But the city of Lancaster is also the most welcoming to newcomers of any place
in the US. It has the highest refugee and immigrant resettlement per capita in the country.
More than 30 percent of the city’s population is of Puerto Rican origin.
Arroyo’s first exposure to the ASSETS organization came when Jess King, who headed
ASSETS at the time, tried to recruit him. “I wasn’t quite sure about the nonprofit life, coming from banking… but you know what, I’ll volunteer,” he recalls saying.
He spent a year helping with learning circles. The circles are a 10-week cohort training exercise in business plan development for new entrepreneurs. “After that, I just fell in love with the mission.”
In 2017, a few months after telling King that he would be interested in any position that opened up, he joined ASSETS. His job was leading a community lending department, focusing on microloans of between $1,000 and $50,000.
The lending program also provides technical assistance, including credit counseling and financial coaching for women and black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC)
entrepreneurs.
At the end of 2019, Arroyo left ASSETS to become chief strategy officer with Community Action Partnership, Lancaster’s largest antipoverty organization.
When ASSETS was looking for a new CEO in 2022, Arroyo applied and was offered the job.
“I’m looking forward to help lead ASSETS not only deeper into Lancaster County but actually become a regional organization as a micro-lender and as a CDFI (community development financial institution).”
CDFIs are financial institutions that provide credit and financial services to underserved markets and populations. The US Department of the Treasury provides funding to CDFIs through a range of programs.
Achieving Arroyo’s goal of offering services regionally will require a shift in mindset at ASSETS. He said the organization will need to think like the entrepreneurs it serves and how it can become self-sufficient.
“Part of that is generating revenue, thinking like a social enterprise.”
ASSETS programs were available in other areas of Pennsylvania more than 20 years ago. A Fall 1999 article in MEDA News cited ASSETS programs in Harrisburg and Norristown as well as Lancaster.
ASSETS currently has two main loan products. Its small business loan offers between $1,000 and $10,000 for up to 36 months. This product has an eight percent fixed interest rate. It also differs from what is offered by conventional banks. Businesses don’t have to demonstrate a two-year track record
or a specified credit score.
ASSETS provides credit counseling and financial coaching. Its goal is that after repaying the loan, an entrepreneur will be prepared to work with a traditional financial institution to access larger amounts of capital to grow their business.
The second ASSETS product, which Arroyo developed in 2018, is an impact loan, offering between $10,000 and $50,000.
Applicants need to demonstrate a commitment to “the triple bottom line, people, planet, and profit for their businesses,” he said. “We want to make sure that they’re measuring, they’re measuring and improving their social and environmental performance.”
Clients who achieve specified milestones are rewarded with an interest rate discount.
These loans typically have terms of between 12 and 60 months, are fully open, and repayable without penalty.
Arroyo said ASSETS currently has about $100,000 in outstanding loans, with about $600,000 available for additional loans.
Its average loan size is
under $5,000. People seeking that size of loan are often looking for equipment they may need to open a restaurant or renovate a food truck.
Other common needs include catering supplies and equipment or working capital to hire staff during a busy season.
A third lending product, ASSETS’ Reimagining Our Community loan, allows people who started a business before or during the pandemic to apply for up to $10,000. “It’s meant to assist or give a boost for recovery.”
The new loan product has two unique features. After the borrower makes a loan payment, ASSETS will forgive up to 30 percent of the remaining principal as a grant.
Second, the product has a one percent fixed interest rate. “The intention is, we need to give our small businesses a boost to recover from the pandemic.”
Borrowers do have to demonstrate a credit score of 620 or higher. “But if they don’t qualify for that loan, we don’t turn them down. What we can do is then direct them to the small business loan, which doesn’t have a credit score requirement.”
Many successful business leaders are now realizing that as women and BIPOC business owners are able to grow and scale their businesses, it will help everyone else thrive as well, says Mike Mason, ASSETS chief program officer.
“Our economy will get better and will get stronger if more people have the opportunity to grow and thrive,” he said. .
Bringing people together to work through their differences in our increasingly fractured society seems perilous. Yet in times such as these, peacemakers are needed more than ever.
With Stuck Together, Kraybill offers a valuable tonic for our tumultuous era.
The author, minister, and former seminary president writes with curiosity and hope, plumbing the depths of difficult disputes many would prefer to avoid. He draws on a rich well of spiritual and life experience to help readers find ways to navigate our religious, cultural, political, racial, and other differences.
He examines a variety of fault lines that have run through church and secular history and explains how differing moral foundations can bring people to deeply held, opposing beliefs about hot-button issues.
Kraybill’s careful meditations on Old and New Testament scripture examine biblical polarities on such issues as how people of faith should treat outsiders. His stories about “modern ambassadors of reconciliation” include an Indigenous Peace Chief in Oklahoma, an inner-city worker in Indiana, and a Presbyterian minister in Ireland who secretly brought Catholic and Protestant militants together to explore and build on their shared humanity during
decades of religiousbased conflict. Each chapter in the book ends with questions for reflection and discussion, making it a good resource for small group conversation. As Kraybill writes in the introduction: “Humanity needs Christians — millions of us — to live into God’s promise to heal and restore what is broken.”
This book and its closing options for action provide helpful suggestions for this journey. .
The Kingdom of God in Working Clothes: The Marketplace and the Reign of God by R. Paul Stevens (Cascade Books, 2022, 204 pages, $28 US)
Few people are better qualified to discuss the intersection of faith and the workplace than the author.
Stevens, a professor emeritus in theology at Regent College and chair of Regent’s Institute for Workplace Transformation, has written extensively about the Christian
faith and the marketplace over the course of his varied careers. Those careers include working as a pastor, a businessman, a carpenter, a student counselor, and an academic.
Stevens has spoken at MEDA’s annual convention on a few occasions.
The Kingdom of God in Working Clothes is a theological deep dive, an important and challenging read.
Stevens explains how all work done well can be kingdom work, “a means of bringing grace into the world and to people for the common good and that through down-to-earth work — the kingdom of God in working clothes.”
He thoroughly examines God’s initiatives to bring about God's Kingdom values from the beginning to the end of the Bible. He also looks at virtues, values, the value of business in kingdom work, and the forces that oppose kingdom progress.
The book is far from merely theoretical, as Stevens artfully applies theology and theory to our daily aspirations.
In one spot, he rewrites Jesus’s Beatitudes for people who work in business and not-for-profit enterprises.
In a closing chapter, he tackles the question of how humans will spend their time in the new Heaven and New Earth.
Read this book. Share it with anyone who struggles to understand the connection between the marketplace and God’s purposes. .
On Getting Out of Bed. The Burden & Gift of Living by
How do you eat an elephant, the old joke asks. One bite at a time. That measured approach is critical in trying to respond to the sometimes-crushing burdens that life can present, particularly for people with extreme anxiety or some form of mental illness.
In this thoughtful book, Noble underlines the importance of taking small steps. He takes considerable time to explain why for the benefit of readers who might be tempted to give up. “You need to know that your being in the world is a witness, and it ‘counts for something,’” he writes.
Our accomplishments, however,
are not things that ultimately matter. Noble provides this helpful reminder to people burdened by not being able to do something. While our deeds have no "use value" to God, God created people “just because He loves you and just for His own good pleasure.”
The author is vulnerable in explaining his own struggles while stressing the importance of gratitude for the gift of life.
In cautioning people not to trust their own dark thoughts, he reminds us of the need to trust people
around us.
Modern life is filled with conveniences meant to make life easier. But Noble encourages readers to consider that society is not built for humans as God designed us.
That understanding makes it easier to accept that sometimes depression or anxiety are rational, moral responses to a fundamentally disordered environment, he argues.
This is a helpful resource for people who struggle, and for people who care about them. - MS