Operating in the Central American country of Guatemala, Miracles in Action works to help impoverished individuals help themselves in the areas of education, vocation, and sustainable development. At the turn of the 21st century, flight attendant Penny Rambacher and her mother, Noreen, visited a Guatemalan garbage dump in which families lived and worked; the younger Rambacher, shocked by the quality of life there, vowed to return and bring supplies to those in need. Using her employee discount on flights certainly helped her accomplish this, but she changed the focus of her efforts after realizing that material aid was only a temporary solution to poverty. In 2004, the Miracles in Action foundation was created, and the construction of a school was funded for and organized by the Rambachers a year later. Today, Miracles in Action continues to support schools as launchpads for long-term growth and progress; the 25th school was finished in 2010. The foundation also provides Guatemalans with vocational and teacher training, student scholarships, water filters, and vented stoves.
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.
