For this episode Bruce Main of Urban Promise shares how Urban Promise International began, the difference it makes in empowering young leaders around the world, and what it means to cast vision as a leader.
Thanks for being a part of the HOPE community as we continue conversations about faith and hope! You can learn more at meethope.org or find us on socials @meethopechurch. Join in for worship on Sundays at meethope.live! Have a question? Contact us at podcast@meethope.org.
For this episode Bruce Main of Urban Promise shares how Urban Promise International began, the difference it makes in empowering young leaders around the world, and what it means to cast vision as a leader.
Thanks for being a part of the HOPE community as we continue conversations about faith and hope! You can learn more at meethope.org or find us on socials @meethopechurch. Join in for worship on Sundays at meethope.live! Have a question? Contact us at podcast@meethope.org.
Welcome to the Meet Hope podcast, where we have conversations about faith and hope. Hope is one church made of people living out their faith through two expressions in person and online. We believe a hybrid faith experience can lead to a growing influence in our community and our world for the sake of others. Welcome to Hope.
Jeff Bills:Hey friends, it's Jeff Bills and I am joined today by our good friend, bruce Main of Urban Promise. And Bruce, welcome. Thanks, jeff. Great to be back. Hey, so in this episode we've talked a lot about Urban Promise and there's so much more we can talk about with what's going on in Camden and other cities around the country, but I wanted to focus instead on Urban Promise International, which is just a fascinating thing that's developed over the last few years. So take us all the way back. How did we go from doing what you do here in the States to an international focus?
Bruce Main:Yeah, I mean it's a great question. None of this was part of a strategic plan. I mean, you probably believe that. But we started in Camden, as you know, like 37 years ago, and we created some really fantastic, I think, programs and the word gets out and people start hearing about it and they start calling and knocking on your door and saying, hey, this is interesting, we've got kids, we've got under-resourced communities. So it started spreading domestically a little bit. First I had a guy in Wilmington, delaware, who said you know, we need this down there and then.
Bruce Main:Toronto and Vancouver and Trenton, so. But the turning point was about, I guess about 16 years ago. I'm in my office, jeff, in East Camden, and the door's open and there's a knock on the door and I look up and there's this young man I've never seen him before and I'm like, who are you? And he said, well, I'm William Neosulu. And I said, oh OK, where are you from? And he sent him from Malawi. And he said, well, I've come to do my internship. And I said did you apply? And he said no, I met a friend of yours in South Africa and he told me to come to New Jersey to see Bruce. So I'm here. Oh, my Well, you know who that guy was it's Tony Campolo.
Jeff Bills:Of course.
Bruce Main:Like hey, yeah, just go see Bruce in New Jersey.
Bruce Main:And so I'm like, ok, we'll have you do an internship with us. So a month goes by, he comes back into my office and he's like we need this in Malawi. And I'm like, ok, we'll go write a proposal you know what you want to do, how much it's going to cost and bring it back to me. So a month later he comes back. He's got a proposal. He wants to start an orphanage for boys living on the streets of the capital. And then he wants to do afterschool programs in summer camps, like we do so and it's going to cost $10,000 for the year, the whole budget. So we scraped together some money.
Bruce Main:He goes back and he starts. It's called he calls it youth care ministries. He rents a house, he recruits 12 boys off the streets, he gives them a place to live, three meals a day, gets them back in school, so, and then he's doing afterschool programs, summer camp. I go over there about a year later and I'm in awe of what this guy's doing. I mean, he's running an orphanage on 300 bucks a month, like, and these kids are thriving. And how many, how many boys 12, 12.
Bruce Main:So anyway, while I'm there in Malawi I go to the college he graduated from, a Bible college called the African Bible College, and I speak in chapel after chapel. I'm talking to some of the faculty members, and one of the faculty members I'll never forget this. She says sometimes I want to quit my job, start my own nonprofit organization. And I'm like, why? And she said well, there's no jobs in the country. So most of the kids that I'm training will not work in the area that they're trained to work in. They'll sell cell phone minutes or do subsistence farming. So at that point it was like why don't we bring six or seven of your graduating seniors over to Camden? We'll give them some training, little inspiration, maybe help them get a master's degree in nonprofit leadership and see what happens. So we brought the first cohort over. We had seven fellows. Okay, they spent a year, two years with us. They go back.
Jeff Bills:They, so they're getting their masters at Eastern.
Bruce Main:Yeah, getting their master at Eastern University. Okay, jeff, that first cohort, they go back and they, they birth three more organizations and it was like this is a no brainer, like you've got you know, africa's the youngest continent in the world. Like the average age is is under the age of 18. So it is a continent that's you know. Where other continents birth rates are declining. Africa's growing. You've got all this young energy potential and it's been underdeveloped. And so my thing is we send a missionary to Malawi from the west. A family probably costs $150,000 a year. You know rates, training, right, why?
Bruce Main:not bring a 25 year old college graduate from Malawi here, give them two years of training and then what we do, Jeff, is, if we like the project and like the leader, we get them some seed capital. So they go back and they started. Here we are 16 years later. We have 35 affiliates around the world Wow.
Bruce Main:We've got we've got high schools in Malawi, we've got orphanages, girls empowerment programs, we're in Uganda, kenya, ghana, now Liberia, nigeria, and these are all being run by young, emerging leaders from those countries who have spent time with us. So there you have it. It's just been one of those things where it's like you know, just we stumbled into it and as soon as we started seeing some success, it was like this is a no brainer. Yeah, this is the way you know. I think missions needs to move.
Jeff Bills:Yeah Well, I love the entrepreneurial spirit of it all.
Bruce Main:Yeah.
Jeff Bills:And the hey let's, let's try it and see what happens and adapt along the way. I'm sure, yeah. So how? First of all, how do you? How do you select these fellows? How are they?
Bruce Main:Yeah, so so now, now that we have all these affiliate organizations, so they have staff and they have interns.
Jeff Bills:Okay.
Bruce Main:And so in a sense that a lot of the fellows that were here this morning, they spent at least a year in one of these existing ministries. So they got to put some time in, okay, before they get selected. So that's really important. So we watched them for a year in on the ground in their own country, in their own context. Then the executive directors of those organizations, they will refer these young leaders to the program. So usually by the time they get to us they've been pretty well vetted and and they come there's.
Bruce Main:There's three kinds of fellows that we bring over. One are the entrepreneurs they're going to go back and start a whole new organization, okay. One are what we call. They were called bolt-ons, so they're going to come over, they're going to go back and start a new program at an existing organization, gotcha, okay. So maybe a young woman comes over she says I'm going back, I'm going to start a girls empowerment program. And then the last kind of fellow is what we call capacity builder, because you know, as you know, you built this church, like you know, you started it. But you need capacity builders, like you need staff that can implement your vision and build the policies and processes. So those are the categories of fellows that we're looking for.
Jeff Bills:So they, they're selected, they come here where they living there.
Bruce Main:so they're living in Camden on our campus, okay, and I think, jeff, that is part of the kind of the magic of this is that they, in addition to their master's program, they're actually embedded In our organization so they are watching leaders there being included in conversations. I mean, during covid, I mean I had 15 fellows that were on the front row of watching me and our leadership team, you know, handle that yeah you know, and where do you get that?
Bruce Main:And so you know, I've tried to be as transparent with these young leaders because again, they're going to be running organizations of their own. But what better, you know, you've got the academic piece, the masters, you've got your embedded in an organization and and then you're getting mentored and coached by some senior program people.
Jeff Bills:And so they're. They're doing that. They're, at same time, they're working on their master's degrees, and so what types of degrees are they pursuing?
Bruce Main:mostly nonprofit leadership. So they're getting, you know, they're getting some some courses in fundraising development. They're getting courses in it Administration. They're getting courses in Christian leadership, strategic planning. So when they leave they've got a pretty good, you know, pretty well rounded for the kind of work that they're going to do when they get back.
Jeff Bills:So so much more I'd love to pick your brain about and hear about. But there is this other thing that you shared with me at a lunch a while back that knocked my socks off. So you guys are are playing around with the idea of beyond playing around you're looking at starting a college in Malawi. Yes, tell us about that.
Bruce Main:Yeah, so you know again, it's kind of, you know, exemplifies the urban promise way. You know we, you know, develop these leaders. They go back. They started Seven high schools, so we have seven high schools now in Malawi. Every year those seven high schools graduate between seven and eight hundred kids. Wow, okay, there's no place for them to go. You know, maybe maybe 50 of those 700 will get a spot in one of the state universities, one of the. So and you've got to be in that top, you know, one percent to get a spot. So Harvard level.
Jeff Bills:These are Harvard level kids, yeah, so you know.
Bruce Main:for the rest of us, you know B and C students, you know.
Jeff Bills:Thank you for putting a B in there when you're talking to me.
Bruce Main:You know, I mean, I wasn't a great high school student and you know, you think, like college and grad school I could change my life Absolutely. And you think, how many kids you know, your entrepreneurs, your artists, your writers, you know like maybe that don't test well, they're never developing their full academic potential. So so you know I'm looking at these statistics, jeff like 700 kids every year and I'm going like we got to do something.
Bruce Main:So we developed this idea of starting a university college and we've bought 60 acres of land. We've gone through a master planning exercise, so we've got a plan and we're developing curriculum. I'm working with two of our more senior leaders in the country, in Malawi, who are kind of driving it. Demet, you know, within the country, yeah, and I just got to go out and raise three million dollars, so, but we got the kids, you know, we got the kids, yeah, and that's what's. You know, like it just breaking my heart every year that we don't get this thing open. You know we're losing 650 kids back to subsistence farming. So I think this is, for me, like, and in a country like Malawi, which is 15, 16 million people, like you know, you start educating, you know, the next generation of leaders at that level. Yeah, it can change a country.
Jeff Bills:Well, and in that context and that mindset, three million isn't a lot of money, right?
Bruce Main:Jeff, build a university for three million. Come on, it's not insurmountable, right.
Jeff Bills:And what the difference it'll make in the lives of individual kids. But in a nation, in a nation and on a continent, yeah, it's mind boggling.
Bruce Main:It really is. So you know we've got a lot of hard work to do, and you know. But I've always believed. You know this has been my, probably yours too. You know, being an entrepreneur like you, you know you take these steps and it's like you walk through the door and my philosophy has always been hey, it's not supposed to happen, god will close the door.
Jeff Bills:Yeah.
Bruce Main:But don't wait, you know, start charging.
Jeff Bills:Well, and there may be somebody listening to this podcast or somebody listening who shares it with somebody else. That may bring an idea, a resource, a commitment of some kind into this, and that's that's what I've seen happen in my connection to Urban Promise. You guys always have this mindset of abundance over scarcity and that God's got all the resources God needs to do the stuff that God calls us to do. And we have to have the faith to take the step. And when I was on the board a million years ago, the big thing that we were looking at was this thing called the forward school, and it was big, it was scary. We were barely making budget for just the ministry we're doing at the time. Now we're going to do a school, and how's that school going today?
Bruce Main:Well, yeah, you were there. I mean, I remember the night we voted on whether we should open the school and you were there, you were chairing the board at that time, and it was like, yeah, I mean there was a million reasons not to do it. And then, you know, one of the things I always hear is sustainability. You know, is it going to be sustainable? And I get that, I get the question, but it's like nothing's sustainable. You know, I mean, even we've seen, you know, fortune 500 companies like fall apart.
Bruce Main:So you know it, I just have to believe that if, if God is in this and God is calling us. You know, like you said, you cast a vision and you see who shows up. And if you don't cast a vision, if you don't walk forward, nobody's going to come forward. But I can't tell you how many times I've just, you know, we've seen, we saw it with the forward school. We launched, it started with 50 kids and you know, we didn't know how we were going to make it. And then somebody hears about it, and then somebody tells somebody else and here we are 25, 27 years later, and you think of all the hundreds of kids who have benefited from that education and you go like what if we didn't do it? What if we and I remember that vote, we had some people on the board abstain and it was a narrow margin and we could probably dig up the minutes and find out who did, but you didn't.
Jeff Bills:I, I, no, no, but I was terrified.
Bruce Main:Yeah.
Jeff Bills:But again it's. You know the God. God was in it and we could see God's fingerprints on it and you know, the worst thing at that point would be to not try and and to and to trust friends. If you're listening to this again, I just encourage you to share it with a friend. Let's get the word out about urban promise, about urban promise international. It is one of the most exciting things happening in Camden County and it has been going on for 37 years and and we've got at hope, we've gotten to be a little part of it, sitting on the sidelines cheering these guys on and getting involved. As I shared this morning, we have members of your staff, bruce, that are members of the board members board members volunteers, a lot of volunteers running the thrift shop.
Bruce Main:I mean you know the whole nine yards yeah.
Jeff Bills:Yeah, people love this ministry and so share, share the good news, share it with some friends and let's see how God shows up. Hey, thanks, thanks so much for being with us.
Bruce Main:Great to be back, thanks.
Jeff Bills:Bye bye and thank you all for tuning in. Have a great day.
Intro:Thanks for being a part of the Hope community as we continue our conversations about faith and hope. If you don't already, please join us for worship on Sundays or on demand. You can learn more at meethopeorg or find us on socials at Meet Hope Church.