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In this episode, our co-hosts explore how the smartest move for engaging in global alliances in child welfare, health, and economic development might be asking a better question, not funding a bigger fix. We talk with David Peter Strohl, internationally recognized systems thinking expert and author of *Systems Thinking for Social Change*, about why entrenched challenges in child welfare, global health, and international development can stay stuck even when everyone means well.

David is a founding partner of Bridgeway Partners (www.bridgewaypartners.com), a consulting firm dedicated to helping mission-centered leaders reframe and resolve intractable social and environmental problems. He is also a founding director of the consulting group and informational website www.appliedsystemsthinking.com and a member of the systems thinking faculty for the Academy for Systems Change. David was previously one of the founders of Innovation Associates, the consulting firm whose pioneering work in organizational learning formed the basis for fellow co-founder Peter Senge’s management classic The Fifth Discipline.

We start with the basics: what a system is, why it keeps producing the results it produces, and how interdependence and time delays can trick us into pushing harder or quitting too soon. From there, we get honest about unintended consequences, including “better before worse” dynamics where short-term wins can set up long-term losses. David breaks down the iceberg model so we can move beyond events and trends into system structure: policies, practices, relationships, power dynamics, perceptions, and purpose, which is where real leverage lives.

Then we make it practical with vivid examples. We examine food aid through a systems lens and walk through a clean-water project in Togo where wells failed because the surrounding maintenance system never existed. We also map how a child welfare organization can align prevention, stabilization, development, reunification, evaluation, fundraising, and advocacy by seeing the whole rather than optimizing one part. Along the way, we confront the role of mental models and donor narratives, including the question that stings in the best way: do you want the credit or the results?

If you care about sustainable social change, humanitarian response that builds resilience, and collaboration that strengthens families and communities, this conversation will give you language, frameworks, and questions you can use right away. Subscribe, share this with a friend who cares about impact, and leave a rating and review so more people can find the show.

Think Global, Do Justice Website

Passionate about your faith and making a difference in the world? Check out this podcast!

________

Travel on International Mission, meet local leadership and work alongside them. Exchange knowledge, learn from one another and be open to personal transformation. Step into a 25 year long story of change for children in some of the poorest regions on Earth.

https://www.helpingchildrenworldwide.org/mission-trips.html

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Organize a Rooted in Reality mission experience for your service club, church group, worship team, young adult or adult study. No travel required. Step into the shoes of people in extreme poverty in Sierra Leone, West Africa, Helping Children Worldwide takes you into a world where families are facing impossible choices every day.

Contact support@helpingchildrenworldwide.org to discuss how.

___________

Family Empowerment Advocates support the work of family empowerment experts at the Child Reintegration Centre, Sierra Leone. Your small monthly donation, prayers, attention & caring is essential. You advocate for their work to help families bring themselves out of poverty, changing the course of children's lives and lifting up communities. join

Support the show

Helpingchildrenworldwide.org

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A lot of people want to help vulnerable children, but few of us stop to ask the hardest question: what if we are the problem? Our support of children in adversity could be fueling family separation and making the situation worse. Dr. Laura Horvath sits down with Dr. Rebecca Nhep (Better Care Network) and Elli Oswald (Faith to Action Initiative) to unpack “radical courage” in global child welfare and care reform.

Our guests discuss how embracing truth required us to change long-held assumptions with humility, publicly challenge orphanage models, and face our own culpability in power dynamics. They candidly share when being courageous made them the focus of uncomfortable power dynamics within their communities and careers.

Elli reflects on the courage of families on the ground, including parents navigating poverty, disability, and lack of services who may see residential care as their only option. Rebecca pushes us to reframe the common “abandonment” narrative and to take an honest inward look at the stories that make donors feel like saviors. Rebecca and Elli share their views on the topic addressed in our prior episode (Barna Study) . She talks about how research on Christian support for institutional care reflects both positive and negative trends for change.She explains why action is slow to follow belief, why boldness must stay compassionate, how change requires listening well before speaking, and speaking with kindness presumed.

Then we get practical about donor responsibility, the power attached to money, and what mutual partnership requires when evidence points toward family-based care, deinstitutionalization, and stronger child protection systems. We also address the “rice pot” problem of fundraising and marketing, plus the real safeguarding risks that can emerge when children become the commodity. The goal stays simple and demanding: keep a North Star on children’s best interests, even when it costs us comfort, reputation, or relationships.

If you care about family strengthening, care system reform, and ethical missions and development, press play, then subscribe, share this with someone in your church or nonprofit, and leave a rating and review so more people can find the conversation.

Think Global, Do Justice Website

Passionate about your faith and making a difference in the world? Check out this podcast!

________

Travel on International Mission, meet local leadership and work alongside them. Exchange knowledge, learn from one another and be open to personal transformation. Step into a 25 year long story of change for children in some of the poorest regions on Earth.

https://www.helpingchildrenworldwide.org/mission-trips.html

******

____

Organize a Rooted in Reality mission experience for your service club, church group, worship team, young adult or adult study. No travel required. Step into the shoes of people in extreme poverty in Sierra Leone, West Africa, Helping Children Worldwide takes you into a world where families are facing impossible choices every day.

Contact support@helpingchildrenworldwide.org to discuss how.

___________

Family Empowerment Advocates support the work of family empowerment experts at the Child Reintegration Centre, Sierra Leone. Your small monthly donation, prayers, attention & caring is essential. You advocate for their work to help families bring themselves out of poverty, changing the course of children's lives and lifting up communities. join

Support the show

Helpingchildrenworldwide.org

Send us Fan Mail

Home can disappear in a single night but the memory of it can keep you alive for years. We sit down with Emmanuel Mohammed Nabieu, known as Nabs, to begin a multi-part Child’s View journey that starts before conflict, before separation, and before survival becomes the only goal. Nabs takes us to Sami, his small village in Sierra Leone, where everyone is family, children learn by working and playing side by side, and nights are filled with laughter and stories under the moonlight.

We talk about the people who formed him long before he became a global advocate for family-based care and orphan prevention. You’ll hear about his grandmother Sato, a master storyteller whose mermaid tale makes honesty unforgettable, and the proverb that still guides him. Nabs also shares the lesson his uncle teaches with a real fire, showing why “family is the flame that keeps us warm” and what happens when the wood is pulled apart. Along the way, we remember the friendships, village celebrations, and big dreams that grew in the middle of a rural village - a community in deep poverty that never lacked love.

Then the atmosphere shifts. Strangers pass through carrying babies and fear, adults whisper warnings, and the first gunshots turn a familiar place into confusion and terror. This part ends where his long journey begins, anchored by one steady longing: to go back home, back to family, back to the fire. If you care about child welfare, global health, ethical missions, trauma and resilience, or strengthening families and communities, this story will stay with you. Subscribe, share this with someone who cares about protecting children, and leave a rating and review to help more listeners find Optimistic Voices.

Think Global, Do Justice Website

Passionate about your faith and making a difference in the world? Check out this podcast!

___________

Family Empowerment Advocates support the work of family empowerment experts at the Child Reintegration Centre, Sierra Leone. Your small monthly donation, prayers, attention & caring is essential. You advocate for their work to help families bring themselves out of poverty, changing the course of children's lives and lifting up communities. join

Support the show

Helpingchildrenworldwide.org