Community building is essential to the work of any charitable organization. So it must be even more important to Border Partners, a group working with two towns literally right next to each other on the US-Mexico border! Operating primarily in Puerto Palomas – a small Mexican town on the border of Mexico and New Mexico – Border Partners describes its activities as bringing resources to address needs, which in turn help people create change. Families often have members on both sides of the border; the only hospital in the area is not in Palomas, but in a New Mexico town 45 minutes away. Palomas unfortunately faces even more challenges: an unemployment rate of 80 percent, no government assistance, no banks, no natural gas, little firewood. So to face these challenges, Border Partners helps people help themselves in four areas: education, health and recreation, sustainable technology, and economic growth. The first three of these help individuals increase the value of their human capital, and the fourth helps individuals and businesses alike.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
