One Year Later: Reflections on USAID’s 2020 Evidence Summit on Strategic Religious Engagement

Abstract

This essay outlines the importance of faith-based organizations in humanitarian assistance and international development by examining the history of the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships and its future under the Biden administration. It also describes the findings from the USAID Evidence Summit on Strategic Religious Engagement and puts them in the context of current international crises to demonstrate the essential nature of faith-based organizations to that scope of global development and humanitarian assistance work.

Keywords:

• strategic religious engagement
• faith-based organization
• humanitarian assistance
• international development

[We] honor the role that our faith-based partners at USAID play, often the people who are closest to the communities we serve. They don’t just embrace the idea that every person has equal worth and individual dignity, regardless of their religion, they help advance that dignity in concrete ways every day. And they work to allow those communities a chance to live, love, speak, and pray freely. (USAID Administrator Samantha Power 2021)

I joined the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in March of 2021, during a challenging moment in history. In Ethiopia, a resurgence of conflict was putting millions at risk for famine-like conditions not seen in the Horn of Africa in nearly three decades. Violence, extreme poverty, and corruption were ravaging Central America, causing a movement of irregular migration that uprooted families and communities. Across the globe—from my home in Oregon to places overseas like Brazil, Germany, Greece, Madagascar, and Thailand—wildfires, freezes, and flooding reminded all of us of the weight of climate change. And, perhaps worst of all, a pandemic continued to rage at home and across the world, with countries like India and South Africa experiencing their worst surge of cases to date. As I took my position at USAID, there was nevertheless, despite our grief, a sense of common purpose, and a sense that there could be common cause to a new future.

I am the fourth political appointee to assume the role of the Director of USAID’s Center for Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships since 2002. As I watched compounding crises unfold across the world, I witnessed religious communities and faith-based organizations showing up to serve, as they always have. They leveraged their distinct history, trust, access, and capital to help the suffering while seeking a better place for all. In the Northern Triangle countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, religious leaders built upon a decades-long narrative of religiously-rooted civil society action, calling for an end to poor governance and democratic backsliding. In the Middle East, faith-based organizations delivered education, medical service, and economic development in Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and the West Bank. Religious networks played a pivotal role in rescuing the dying and rebuilding communities after the August 2020 Beirut explosion in Lebanon. Across Africa, religious leaders stewarded their access to communities often unreached by governments to combat misinformation campaigns around the pandemic and save lives. And in the United States, mosques, synagogues, temples, churches, campus groups, and community centers joined in helping distribute the long-awaited Covid-19 vaccines. Through the hardships of the last year, we were reminded anew just how much religious communities, faith-based organizations, and neighborhood groups are always present in places of need, selflessly serving on the frontlines, compassionately advocating for the vulnerable and fiercely defending the dignity of those around them.

In my career, I’ve led communities, organizations, and congregations to seek justice and build a better world. Prior to joining the Agency, I worked as a pastor and a grassroots advocate, championing inclusion and service to and with poor and marginalized communities. This work afforded me the privilege to forge relationships with humanitarians, activists, and development professionals across religious and political spectrums. It also offered keen insight into the depth of the challenges we face globally, and the potential we can offer in building bi-partisan solutions to these challenges here at home.

When President Biden reestablished the Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships by Executive Order on February 14, 2021, he did so with a clear vision to reaffirm the U.S. Government’s longstanding commitment to strengthen partnerships with faith-based and community organizations, noting that they are “vital for the success and effectiveness of the United States’ diplomatic, international development, and humanitarian work around the world.”¹ Partnership and focused engagement with faith-based organizations and religious leaders has been a hallmark of USAID’s humanitarian assistance, development, and human rights work for the last two decades across four different Administrations. When President George W. Bush first established the White House Center for Faith-based and Community Initiatives in 2001, it was a powerful commitment to ensure that faith-based engagement in international aid was not just a principle, but an integrated matter of foreign policy. Through President Bush’s subsequent Plan for Emergency AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), for example, policy became practice in fighting the AIDS pandemic: millions of lives were not only saved, but whole communities were resurrected from the brink of disease and disaster in what became known as “the Lazarus effect,” a nod to ancient stories of inspiration and promise. This effect resulted from the unprecedented, but necessary, collaboration between the U.S. Government and faith-rooted community organizations.

Similarly, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted this phenomenon in unsurprising ways. Faith-based organizations have swiftly built upon their established networks to develop response systems, much as they did in previous global health crises like Ebola and Zika. Their long-standing connections with hospitals, clinics, local leaders, and, most importantly, communities and families have made them a go-to resource for information, basic needs, and emotional and spiritual support. Perhaps in part due to their tendency to take a holistic approach to addressing social problems, they have long modeled what many of us learned during the pandemic: interconnected challenges require integrated solutions.

USAID’s historic 2020 Evidence Summit on Strategic Religious Engagement² was an important focal point in telling and improving this ongoing story of scholarship and partnership between the U.S. government and faith-based actors worldwide. With over 300 government officials, researchers, and practitioners from a wide range of religious and political backgrounds, the Summit offered a convening moment for relief and development professionals to explore the research and evidence around the role of faith engagement in development and humanitarian assistance—and to better understand how best to marshal it pursuant building better policy and practice.

In doing so, the Summit offered a landmark bipartisan effort to demonstrate not only the significance, but the academic import, of the contributions faith-based groups make in pursuit of development outcomes. Included in this journal’s findings you will see that faith communities can be first responders in times of hardship, the last to leave when emergencies subside, or a permanent entity embedded in communities coping with crises. As a result, faith-based organizations often hold positions of special trust—and provide essential social support—particularly in societies wary of outsiders and even their own governments. Their unique, embedded presence makes these organizations indispensable components in the international development community mosaic. The result of these efforts is a foundation upon which to build. Moving forward, a critical dimension will be the metrics and evaluation of these partnerships. As White House Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships Director Melissa Rogers, with her co-author E.J. Dionne Jr., wrote last year in “A Time to Heal, a Time to Build”: “The mission … is serving people in need … the metrics for evaluation should focus on whether vulnerable people’s lives are being improved, not on whether the amount of government funding that flows to faith-based organizations increases” (Rogers and Dionne 2020, 8).

Today, USAID carries forward the work of the Summit with a renewed focus on principle-based policy-making and improving our practices in order to enhance partnerships with faith-based organizations and religious communities that advance shared development and humanitarian goals. Whether it’s responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, addressing root causes of migration in Central America, responding to the ISIS genocide of the Yezidi and Christian communities in Iraq, addressing abuses against women and youth in Nigeria, or defending globally foundational rights such as religious freedom, USAID’s faith-based engagement is solution-oriented, advancing dignity for people in need across all sectors and regions where the Agency works.

As we look around the world at this moment, I’m deeply aware that the pandemic has reversed development progress and triggered tidal waves of grief and pain for so many. Many of the challenges we were facing when I joined the Agency earlier this year have protracted, and we continue to grapple with their second-order impacts. At the same time, I’m tremendously encouraged by my daily interaction with laypersons and leaders of faith. These first-responders unfailingly forge to the frontlines to care for their neighbors in need. Their presence is a promise for a better future, one that calls for the care of people as well as the planet. We are fortunate to partner with them on our shared path as we fulfill President Biden’s mandate for our office: “To bring people of all backgrounds and beliefs together to meet our challenges, perfect our union, and restore the soul of our country.”³

Acknowledgments

Publication of this response essay as part of a special open-access issue of The Review of Faith & International Affairs was made possible by the Templeton Religion Trust. The author is also grateful to Amanda Vigneaud and Alexandra Ledoux Rice for their assistance in preparing this essay.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adam Nicholas Phillips

Adam Nicholas Phillips is the Biden-Harris Administration appointee to lead USAID’s Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. He is also the director of the Local, Faith and Transformative Partnerships Hub within the Development, Democracy and Innovation Bureau, overseeing the first stop shop to non-traditional partnerships. This includes locally-led development initiatives, new partnerships, minority supporting institutions, and American Schools and Hospitals Abroad. For two decades Adam has served as a pastor, movement organizer, and strategist, working at the intersection of faith and public life for NGOs, advocacy groups and electoral campaigns.

Notes

1 See https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/DCPD-202100144/html/DCPD-202100144.htm.

2 See https://www.usaid.gov/faith-and-opportunity-initiatives/2020-evidence-summit-strategic-religious-engagement.

3 See https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/02/14/fact-sheet-president-biden-reestablishes-the-white-house-office-of-faith-based-and-neighborhood-partnerships/.