When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty without Hurting the Poor…and Yourself

Excellent book about the inadvertent damage we do when trying to help. It discusses how to help other communities and countries without accidentally making things worse – how to help in such a way that you build the community itself up, instead of just throwing money and volunteer hours at something and therefore holding it down.

Some of this is “tough love,” but that’s valuable. Sometimes it needs to be. Immediate help and relief are important, but communities need to build themselves up, rather than depending on an outside force, and sometimes we need to be counter-intuitive about what we do to make sure we’re not just “puppeteering” people from the outside.