Program responding to poverty

For Chuck Coward, Christian redemption depends on a quality life on Earth and requires communities to restore the world to God's good design and purpose.

God's purpose, then, includes both a life eternal in the next world and lives in this world that are whole and healthy so that "right relationships" can be developed with God and with one another.

This view has informed Charleston Outreach, a 14-year-old nonprofit that fosters collaboration among churches, individuals, businesses, agencies and municipalities to improve the delivery of aid to the needy who are trapped by situational or generational poverty. Thae goal is to deliver people from crisis, help them stabilize their lives and give them the tools to achieve self-sustainability, Coward said.

Recently, Charleston Outreach, an affiliate of the Charleston Baptist Association, has taken the lead in a new poverty-bashing initiative called the Human Needs Network. Thanks to funding provided by Trident United Way for a six-month pilot program, the network has put to use software developed by Alabama-based Simon Solutions Inc., a company that combines Christian mission with technology solutions meant to empower the church.

The software, called CharityTracker, enables local churches to maintain a shared database of information about aid delivered to clients. When churches are able to centralize key information, they can better track which services have been offered and make their outreach ministries more efficient, Coward said.

"We're wanting to help the church be the church," he said, "to be a life-restoring institution in a broken world."

The Human Needs Network, though still in its early stages, is a culmination of Coward's 21 years of ministry work. Until now, Charleston Outreach mostly has served as a conduit for church mission teams that visit the Lowcountry for a week of creative ministry, helping people in need, offering beachgoers some water, preaching the Good News.

Little by little over the years, Coward recognized gaps in the ways churches serve their communities, he said. Clients of the women's shelter would finish their temporary recuperation with nothing to go to and nothing in their pockets. Young people at the Boys & Girls Club would benefit from temporary mentoring, but then have nothing more to look forward to. A reliable support system was missing, he said.

So Coward worked to make connections between churches and families, between those graced by privilege and those less fortunate.

Two years ago, he met Kathy Easley, Trident United Way's vice president of Safety Net Services. Coward and Easley quickly saw an opportunity for collaboration. United Way could bring service agencies to the table, the Human Needs Network could bring churches to the table and a newly conceived tri-county Safety Net Assistance Network, using CharityTracker, could tie everything together.

"It was such a perfect fit," Easley said of the relationship.

Coward extended the "safety net" metaphor.

"The more knots you tie in a net, the stronger it is and the tighter the weave becomes," he said, adding that knot-tying was an obligation borne of a Christian's covenant with God.

The goal is to weave a safety net consisting of a primary coordinating team, many area coordinators located in the communities they serve, and hundreds of local churches that forge clusters of cooperation both large and small, Coward said. As the project evolves, Coward said, he hopes to employ full-time licensed counselors who serve as area coordinators, and work with individual churches to build "human needs response teams" made of various people who can apply their particular skills to the effort. If someone is good at budgeting, perhaps she can provide financial assistance to clients. If someone else is a good communicator, perhaps he can perform client assessments and referrals.

In May 2008, Easley and Coward organized a Human Needs Response conference attended by 40 churches. Last March, they launched a CharityTracker pilot, funded by Trident United Way. They are working closely with Simon Solutions to provide feedback on the computer program and make the local effort a national model that can be replicated elsewhere, Coward said.

Today, eight months after CharityTracker was first put to use and six months after the official pilot launched, 45 churches and agencies, 87 trained individual agents, 8,266 cases and 9,407 records are registered in the database. About $500,000 in aid has been distributed.

Among regular users are Stallsville United Methodist Church in Summerville, St. Andrew's Church and East Cooper Baptist in Mount Pleasant, Northbridge Baptist Church in West Ashley and Midland Park Ministry Center (part of Riverbluff Church) in North Charleston.

Easley said the program has been popular with churches that want to deliver aid more efficiently and like the idea of developing solutions that do more than simply dole out emergency assistance. The purpose is to assess the circumstances of everyone seeking help and to develop a strategy for putting them on the road to self-sufficiency, she said.

"It's one of those programs where the more people who use it the better it will be," she said.

The computer application allows users to communicate easily with one another, send incident alerts across the network and track cases.

"What we used to have to do was get on the phone and call people," Easley said. The database makes ministry to the poor much easier and more reliable, she said.

Bob Tennyson, a commercial banker at Community FirstBank and chairman of Charleston Outreach's board, said many churches are overwhelmed by requests for aid and want any help they can get. The Human Needs Network is a way for churches to plug into a system that provides essential support to those in the business of providing support, he said, and it empowers churches to focus on their own geographical area and particular strengths.

"The next step is really for each church to decide how they will best build the team to respond, to get people with ability in a particular area to really step up," Tennyson said. Congregations are valuable resources that communities can tap into. And parishioners can seize an opportunity to work in areas where they feel they have a calling, he said.

Coward said he's taking his three-hour training program on the road, bringing it to communities whose church congregations and administrations can gather in fellowship and shared purpose. He said he hopes to develop a life coach module, to be introduced early next year, which engages a team of volunteers, each with particular expertise, to intervene positively in the lives of people in need.

So far in the Charleston metropolitan area, response to poverty has been relatively isolated, he said. Each church and each agency does its best. More effective is a collaborative response, one that empowers churches and agencies to do what they do in more efficient and effective ways, providing emergency assistance and, increasingly, the tools that enable the poor to improve their condition, he said.

And it has been easy to convince church leaders of the value of the Human Needs Network and easy-to-use CharityTracker system, he said.

"It's because they need help."

Reach Adam Parker at aparker@postandcourier.com or 937-5902.