Mission

To reframe the story of need.

When we ask ourselves what people need to know about the world we don’t come up with typical answers. Western culture and the mainstream media often connect newsworthiness to things like power, entertainment, wealth, self-interest, success or fame. Those who suffer, when they appear in the news at all, seem more like statistics or cautionary tales than neighbors in need. Otherwise, they have little to do with us or our everyday lives.

We believe the opposite is true. Where there is suffering, there must be awareness. Where there is need, there is responsibility.

 

Vision

To help inspire and fuel a movement of people who see the world as it is, even as they work toward a world as it was meant to be. The people of this movement write themselves into the story of need. Some of them notice the marginalized. Some care for the forgotten. Some learn to love and pray for their enemies. Others help orphans and widows and the sick. Still others use their resources to challenge the systems that perpetuate suffering in the world around them.

 

Values

• Advocacy — We give voices to the voiceless and names to nameless “others,” whether they live far away or in the apartment buildings across the street.
• Authenticity — We try to do justice to the human side of every story, whether it be a profile or a blog post on current events. We also try to present, in the words of famous journalist, Carl Bernstein, “the best obtainable version of the truth.” However, we readily admit that we approach each story we tell from a specific perspective, and that our portrayal of it is necessarily incomplete and provisional.
• Faith — As a follower of Jesus, our founder believes an essential human vocation is to help bring about the healing and restoration of God’s good creation and to herald and attempt to live out a new reality and way of life in which the hungry are fed, the stranger is welcomed and the sick are nursed back to health. Faith in the possibility of this life- and world-changing kind of story runs through every one of our reports of famine, poverty, environmental degradation, violence, oppression and disease.
• Partnership — As we tell stories and develop our resources and on-the-ground projects, we work with partners from a variety of faith and non-faith perspectives.
  
• Integration – In an effort to sketch a more complete picture of the story of need, we examine it through a variety of lenses, including journalism, history, philosophy, religion and narrative. We hope our content is more vibrant, useful and thought-provoking as a result.