If you’ve been following Connection’s Serving Well audio series, you’ll be excited to know Part 3: Communicating Impact is officially live!
This three-part podcast has featured speakers from different regions, departments, and seasons in our journey of service, providing a comprehensive look behind the curtain at why and how we serve the physically and spiritually thirsty through our WPAs and what our new and innovative way of communicating their annual impact means for our staff, supporters, and those we serve.
Tune in now to Serving Well Part 3: Communicating Impact to listen to our Senior VP of Programs, Barak Bruerd, and Deputy RVP for Africa, Stephen Okiror, draw on stories from the field and their personal experience to illustrate how we honor our global and engagement neighbors by communicating holistic impact through the lens of innovation.
- Serving Well Part 1: The Reason | Listen Now | “What does it mean to truly serve at Living Water International?” with Jonathan Wiles. In this episode, our Chief Operations Officer dives into our biblical foundations, our holistic approach to WASH services and community development, how and why we co-labor with the Church, and more.
“Our questions are: ‘What’s God already doing here?’ Right? We don’t bring God into the community. He’s already at work… ‘What are the resources He’s already placed here? What are the good things that are already happening?’ …And then we ask the question, ‘With what you know, what could be possible?’ … ‘If the Kingdom of God were to break into your community in a powerful way today, what would that look like?’… then we go from there to say, ‘Okay, so, then what does obedience look like?’”
–Jonathan Wiles, COO
- Serving Well Part 2: The Journey | Listen Now | “How did we get here?” with Wesley Charles and Aleisha Elliott. This episode will take us back in time to the decision to begin working within WPAs and the significance of this shift, as well as candidly dive into the challenges and opportunities of measuring our direct and indirect impact in empowering holistic flourishing.
“That’s why before 2011 we used to be called a first-time water access organization…we would target very small communities of just 50 families or 75 families maximum…and we would provide water to those people. That was a privilege, for me to be part of our group of staff, of colleagues, that tested these ideas, these concepts…because, really, in 2011, when we talked about a WPA, it was just… a concept. But now we had to land that concept, to translate that concept, you know, into a reality.”
–Wesley Charles, RVP for LAC
“The field is…an alphabet soup of acronyms, but…we’re concerned with the same things…to answer the questions: Where are we starting from? Where do we want to go? That is, what is our goal? And how do we know when we’ve achieved this goal? And then, when we do get there, how do we know we’ve done it well–with excellence, with quality, and in line with God’s calling for our organization? And finally… how do we continue to seek God’s direction for us through learning from our experience along the way?”
–Aleisha Elliott, Director of MEL
- Serving Well Part 3: Communicating Impact | Listen Now | “What is this new way of communicating how many people we serve?” with Barak Bruerd and Stephen Okiror. This episode harnesses the power of storytelling to illustrate the new annual estimate methodology for communicating the impact of our WPAs in an engaging and exciting way, explaining its value to both program and engagement neighbors while pointing listeners to our plans for continued improvement.
“This picture, year in and year out motivates me, again, to go for the harvest–knowing that the harvest is plentiful and that there is a wonderful impact story behind every single number… That is the ripple effect of this particular method.”
–Stephen Okiror, Deputy RVP for Africa
“The saturate pilot is really an initiative to provide some safe space within our programs to be able to innovate and test out different ideas and see what works and what doesn’t work, because innovation–by nature–is disruptive, and it requires experimentation, and experimentation requires failure… And we learn and grow together…you know, the old adage is, if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.”
–Barak Bruerd, Senior VP of Programs
We hope this series has blessed, inspired, and equipped you. From all of us to all of you–thank you for serving well.