Excited but scared

When I started the journey of finding a way to help "my neighbors" I was (and still am) very excited. But then I started reading some really great books on the subject like When Helping Hurts and I quickly became scared. Why? Because I learned from reading these books that the majority of the attempts to help have actually hurt. You really need to read some of the books to understand this (go to the Resources page under About Us) but one way to think about it is things we do for short term gain that really have longer term negative consequences. My favorite example of that came from a book I read by Thomas Sowell called Economic Facts and Fallacies where he talks about elected officials that raise taxes too much. In the short term they are heroes because there is more money to spend but in the long term there are negative consequences as taxpayers move to avoid the higher taxes. the last thing I want to do is hurt more than I help. While it sounds easy to focus on giving a hand up (note our logo) rather than a handout, in practice that can become very complicated and messy. Add to that the differences in cultures (and there are a lot of them) and it is easy to see why I am scared.