As someone who wants to give generously with greater impact, wouldn’t you want to have information on how your dollar makes a difference in the lives of the people you’re helping? Wouldn’t you be a more cheerful and inspired giver when you see how your money changes lives? There is data and information that can tell you if you are creating a greater impact with your giving as there are independent organizations that have made it their mission to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of charitable organizations.
We are joined today by Jay Dykstra of Bless Big to talk about assessing the cost-effectiveness of nonprofit and charitable organizations. Veering away from traditional methods of evaluating charities, these organizations like Bless Big, use progressive metrics when reviewing track records of nonprofits. As Jay highlighted, we should learn how to invest our resources in ways that both create financial interests and more importantly, greater human impact. After all, says Jay, that’s where Jesus spent a good amount of his time - creating a greater impact on the lives of people.
Key Points From This Episode:
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
Helen Keller international’s Vitamin A Supplementation Program
Click to Find out more about our upcoming event: "Crafting Your Kingdom Investing Thesis"
About Jay Dykstra
Jason “Jay” Dykstra is an experienced medical doctor, board certified as a diagnostic radiologist. He is the founder of Bless Big, a free and simple online hub maximizing the research-proven impact of charity donations. He is also the founder of worldwidehousechurch.org which organizes free small group or house church meetups anytime, anywhere, and with whoever is safest and from which a user-friendly database of global teachers/topics, worship options, and high-impact charities are offered. Jay is also the author of Healing Hereafter, a free ebook series exploring rational and refreshing answers to many difficult faith questions at jasondykstrawrites.com.
As someone who wants to give generously with greater impact, wouldn’t you want to have information on how your dollar makes a difference in the lives of the people you’re helping? Wouldn’t you be a more cheerful and inspired giver when you see how your money changes lives? There is data and information that can tell you if you are creating a greater impact with your giving as there are independent organizations that have made it their mission to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of charitable organizations.
We are joined today by Jay Dykstra of Bless Big to talk about assessing the cost-effectiveness of nonprofit and charitable organizations. Veering away from traditional methods of evaluating charities, these organizations like Bless Big, use progressive metrics when reviewing track records of nonprofits. As Jay highlighted, we should learn how to invest our resources in ways that both create financial interests and more importantly, greater human impact. After all, says Jay, that’s where Jesus spent a good amount of his time - creating a greater impact on the lives of people.
Key Points From This Episode:
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
Helen Keller international’s Vitamin A Supplementation Program
Click to Find out more about our upcoming event: "Crafting Your Kingdom Investing Thesis"
About Jay Dykstra
Jason “Jay” Dykstra is an experienced medical doctor, board certified as a diagnostic radiologist. He is the founder of Bless Big, a free and simple online hub maximizing the research-proven impact of charity donations. He is also the founder of worldwidehousechurch.org which organizes free small group or house church meetups anytime, anywhere, and with whoever is safest and from which a user-friendly database of global teachers/topics, worship options, and high-impact charities are offered. Jay is also the author of Healing Hereafter, a free ebook series exploring rational and refreshing answers to many difficult faith questions at jasondykstrawrites.com.
EPISODE 22
[INTRODUCTION]
ANNOUNCER: Imagine taking your generosity to the next level, impacting more lives, and leaving a godly legacy for generations to come. Get ideas and strategies to do just that when you listen to these personal stories from high-level Kingdom champions.
The Kingdom Investor Podcast showcases business leaders who have moved from success to significance, sharing how they use worldly wealth for Kingdom impact. Discover how they grew in generosity, impacted more lives, and built godly legacies. You'll find motivation, inspiration, and practical steps to grow as a Kingdom Investor.
Daniel White (DW): Hello and welcome to the Kingdom Investor Podcast. This is your host Daniel White, and my co-host, David Clinton. We are interviewing Dr. Dykstra who is a radiologist and a young adult mentor of 20 years. He founded BlessBig.org, an online community who multiplies physical and spiritual healing in God's kingdom by researching and recommending the initiatives with the highest independently-proven impact per dollar. He has enjoyed teaching on this topic at church, and at global conferences and the Washington Post and other media outlets and at medical schools like Harvard, Michigan State and the University of Michigan. He and his wife are adoptive parents of two wonderful energetic boys in Michigan. And now, let's get right into the show.
[INTERVIEW]
DW: Welcome to The Kingdom Investor Podcast. I have Jay and David with me. Jay, would you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and where you're coming to us from?
Jay Dykstra (JD): Sure, yeah, first of all, it's a great honor just to be working with people who really want to maximize the kingdom impact for Jesus and also for the people of the world and our global neighbors. My wife and I live in West Michigan, and I'm a radiologist. And so I practice here with a very large group of fellow radiologists, we have two kids through adoption from Detroit. So we've been blessed to be part of a lot of different transracial and adoption and foster care types of communities. And our journey really led us in a lot of different directions, but to two primary endpoints so far, and that is to work with young adults and do a lot of advocacy with them. But through that, also to take a financial journey of being able to learn how to take resources and advocacy, and maximize our impact at least as much as we feel like we can, as much as we can learn to do so for the kingdom of God, both through humanitarian means and also through evangelism and discipleship and church planting.
And that has resulted in the founding of Bless Big, which is an online hub for doing so where we can gather the organizations that research has most robustly proven to have a high impact per dollar. And also be able to develop a community there where we can develop advocates together and bounce ideas off each other with experts around the world on finance, humanitarian aid, and really just international health and development, which is awesome. So, it's been a really cool journey wouldn't have anticipated it. But God has just brought us in all kinds of different places and kind of brought each component of our journey together. And my wife and I, and even my kids really are starting to love doing that all as a unit, which is great.
David Clinton (DC): I'd love to dig a little more into Bless Big. When did you start that? And what are the mechanics of it?
JD: Yeah, thank you Bless Big is two and a half years old. So, it's relatively new. But it's the product of a years-long personal journey for my wife and I on how to invest our own resources in ways that both create financial interests, that's successful because we're all interested in that, but also to create human interest that can compound on itself and therefore create, hopefully, an even greater impact. And we think a much greater impact. And if we focus more on finances alone, and that is bolstered by the fact that we have worked with young adults for many years, and so we're seeing them now get into their careers and build their own families and develop their own mentalities of giving and investing and creating impacts themselves. And so we're seeing the fruit of that now as that grows, and that builds and that human interest, not just on the impact end of the health and the gospel and discipleship that's been able to be brought to the world through that. But also on the advocacy end, where there are many people that we've worked with who are now advocating themselves to their peer groups to do this also.
JD: So Bless Big really was just our way of consolidating everything we used and learned from all kinds of different experts around the world, to put that out there in a free resource for anyone to use so that they could benefit from the journey that we've went on and that God brought us on. So, yeah, so what that has culminated in really is working with over 22 different charity auditors and evaluators all around the world who do really good retrospective third-party robust impact research on thousands and thousands of organizations and some of these. You've heard of like a Charity Navigator, may be a GiveWell for some people, or the ECFA, or Ministry Watch on the Christian end. And some of them a lot of people haven't heard of, because they're so scientific and so deep in their research that people don't usually encounter those in just general public circles. But what we've done is to try to take as many of these evaluators as we can and to weigh the strength of their impact evidence, so that we can offer people the most robustly comprehensively across the board have proven organizations that have the highest impact per dollar for the type of cause that they're engaging, whether that's a Christian cause evangelism and discipleship, or whether that's a humanitarian cause like preventing communicable disease, or creating international development or community development, or other problems that we engage in this country all the time, things like, you know, kind of personal upward mobility, mental illness and so forth.
DC: That's amazing. What I'm curious is if there are certain lanes that you focused on when you were doing your research with you and your wife, you know, I like to categorize these things. As far as maybe the Great Commission lane, and evangelism, discipleship, the great commandment, you know, loving others and the least of these and feeding the poor, and then, you know, the creation mandate, building communities and, and business and mission and things like that. Does it focus on any one of these places? Or is it broad enough to cover all of them?
JD: I think the niches that we wanted to fill with Bless Big, obviously, there are charity evaluators out there, but there are very few that include both secular and Christian charities. Okay, first of all, so that was one place, there are some that do, but they don't do very deep impact research. So, you have plenty of deep-impact researchers who do secular charities, but only a very small number of them and only a very limited group of causes or types of interventions. And then you have groups that do solely Christian charities, but they often tend to be a little bit more research-light, and don't provide them the most robust, proven kind of research that we would look for, and where we would want to invest our resources. And so, we wanted to provide a resource that really deeply did really good solid retrospective research and took advantage of that which has already been done, of course, for both types of charities. We also wanted to be able to include, of course, within that, then the evangelism, discipleship and church planting type of research that would not inherently be considered or included in any sort of check, secular charity evaluation network.
JD: And so those were, I guess, two of the three niches we wanted to fill. The third is that a lot of these organizations, whether they're on the Christian or secular side, tend to focus only on a narrow group of causes. So they only focus on evangelism and discipleship, which is great. But they won't focus on the many different types of Humanitarian Aid or Mental Illness or other types of economic suffering that we see throughout the world that Jesus himself focused on. Right. And so bless big seeks to give you a variety of cause groups, not every single cause, of course, but a variety of cause groups that you can pick from first and then pick the organization within that cause group that you feel from the research that we've done has the highest impact.
DC: Amazing. It's such good work.
JD: Yeah, one, just one of the things that we think this actually mirrors what Jesus did. A lot of people will say, you should only do evangelism, because that's forever, that's the most important thing. And it is forever and very important and we are called to make disciples, not just converts, of course, but they can't evangelize people who are dead. And again, you can't evangelize people who are so sick, that they can't understand the gospel, or won't listen to you because you're not in tune with their needs. And if you look at how Jesus spent his time, it's actually about a third doing humanitarian work and healing, a third doing evangelism and just straight up getting the gospel message out there. And a third, doing discipleship and really kind of smaller, focused, you know, advocacy with the people around him.
DC: Wow, that's so helpful. I love that.
JD: I've actually gone through the entire gospels, and actually looked at that and counted that up because I wanted to see how Jesus lived his life. And that's exactly really how it pans out. So that's, that's kind of what we're trying to do as well.
DC: That's beautiful, both ends - feeding the hungry and taking care of people, whether or not they're followers of Jesus, extending and helping them become followers of Jesus. These are both extremely important things that Jesus modeled for us. That's great.
JD: Yeah. And you find that some of these secular organizations for people who might balk at, that they actually do a far better job on the humanitarian side than Christian ones, which allows more people to be alive and healthy. So that Christian organizations are able to go into these areas and be able to more adequately and fruitfully be able to set up evangelism and discipleship networks there. So they work together, which is great. And I think it's important to take advantage of both of them. Like you said, even if we're not dealing with a Christian organization or Christian population, there's still Kingdom investment advantages to focusing on both of them.
DW: I'd love to hear a little bit more about your background and your story, your personal story about how you arrived at this, and kind of some of the pieces that fell into place to make this happen. But before we do that, would you mind praying for us, and this time on the podcast and for our listeners?
JD: Not at all. Thank you for inviting me to do that. Let's pray.
Dear Father, I thank you so much for the amazing opportunity that you've given so many of us just to Impact your world, and really all of us as members of the global body of Christ. I praise you that we get to be involved in your great movement of this kingdom that's being built. and that's flourishing. And I just pray that we are able to take the specific resources, you've gifted us with - money, education, whatever it might be, and just really be able to bless your global body having equal concern for every part. Thank you so much, that there are so many exciting things, that people are doing exciting things that people are teaching for us to be able to do this well. And I just really pray that we get swept up in the excitement of what you started, so that we can honor you, as our Head of the Body most of all, but also just bring great healing and the gospel and growth both physically and spiritually to the people you care about all over the planet. In Jesus' name, amen.
DC: Amen. Thank you, Jay.
DW: Yeah. So if you don't mind, just kind of going back and sharing a little bit about your background and your story. And really kind of the, I guess, the genesis story behind blessed big and how that even came to be?
JD: Yeah, I think there were a couple kind of components that were really tributaries of that endpoint for us. The first is that we had a couple of examples of what people would call “radical generosity”, I think, in our lives. And some of these were very peripheral, just people we heard of, but heard of doing very specific things in the giving world and investing world. And also some more closer to home examples, like, my parents, for example, who kind of made it a normal thing for us to think about, at least giving a decent amount of our resources to places that were going to produce Kingdom investment. And so, I think thanks to those influences, and God obviously placed those in our lives. It was easier for Laura and I to think of that as being a normal thing or as a desirable thing to pursue, instead of being a jarring or kind of just a step out of what we were used to. And I think maybe I underestimated sometimes how much easier made the rest of that journey. And so I need to mention that and be thankful to God for that and to those people.
JD: I think secondly, the second influence is just an innate kind of tendency in me to want to maximize what I'm doing and be most efficient at what I'm doing and to get the highest ROI for what I'm doing. And I know that there are a lot of people listening to this right now who can certainly identify with that sort of pursuit and desire. But that goes far beyond just a bottom line and a number that we might chase after financially. We learned through working with young adults, and through working with students, which is something that started very early on that maximizing human interest in many ways can be far more impactful than maximizing financial interest. And so, our financial journey was always occupied by, I guess, grew in the context of focusing at least as much on human interest and compounding that with our resources than purely just investing those resources to create some sort of large financial kind of benefit or compounding someday to be able to do good with.
JD: And so the second kind of drive is just a desire to create a maximum ROI, but not just financially, but from a human standpoint, and human and mixed impact standpoint, too. And I think both of those things, whether they were the examples of generosity, or just that drive to create impact, are driven biblically. And I think just being with God and spending time with Him regularly in his word. It's something that we're all taught to do as Christians, but we forget that when in reality we're not pursuing, doing as much justice as we can, or as much good as we can, or being as moral as we can. In reality, we're pursuing this wedding banquet in heaven someday with God, and we are actually pursuing this marriage with him. And so this life is really aligning ourselves with this person and not just doing things which separate Christianity, of course, from very ethical and generous people who are not Christians. They can do all that stuff just as well as we can, in some cases better. But they don't have any of that relationship component of that desire to really align themselves with their god or be with Him forever.
JD: And so as we were becoming more familiar with what Jesus and God talks about, especially about money, and Jesus says a lot of really jarring things about money, of course, it became very apparent that Jesus Himself through His example and through his teaching, really, really focused a lot more on creating human interest and letting that compound over his ministry and over the next 2000 years, or we wouldn't be talking about this today, more than he did focusing on compounding the interest and I guess growth of resources itself. And of course, there's nothing wrong with doing that. But I can go through all kinds of Scripture that influenced us that would show us that Jesus, both an example and in a word, indeed, essentially, emphasized that. And so focusing our resources on creating human interest now, and human impact now, at least as much as we were devoting resources to creating financial interest later, became a really, really ingrained mantra of our journey. And it's really a hugely ingrained portion of Bless Big.
JD: And so personally, what that resulted in was for us to set a cap on our own personal expenditures. And that cap has remained the same for the last nine years, 10 years now. And that hasn't been to set our family expenditures before at less than $50,000 a year. Now, that's not a realistic cap for some people. I'm not saying that's all the cap anybody should set. I'm simply saying that was the challenge we wanted to give ourselves. It was something we were easily doing when it was just two of us in residency, but it was something we didn't find was difficult to maintain once we even had children and started a family. And that's not any sort of magic number. It's not something we've you know, we're saying is look at us, it's great, it's just a limit that I think all of us can focus on placing on ourselves, whatever that level is, so that we can focus our model of generosity not so much on how much we give, but how much we keep. And if you look at what Jesus teaches us, that's exactly what he does with a woman who can only give the two coins, versus the guy who is piling on gifts at the temple. He says who's more generous, and the disciples got it right and said, it's the woman who kept less not the person who gave more. And when you couple that with the amount of impact you can have by giving in the most strategic places, that's a model that ends up being applicable to anyone not just to the Bill Gateses and Oprah Winfreys and Elon Musks of the world.
JD: But to anyone making any income, they can set an expenditure limit, decide to be generous by keeping less whatever that looks like for them, and then learn how to make the highest amount of impact per dollar with what they can give as a result. And so, that became just a beautiful model of generosity that everyone we work with can identify with, whether they're a college student with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, or whether there's someone nearing retirement who has tens of millions of dollars, it's a model that Jesus gives us that that works well. And it also fits very well with his desire for us to focus on the soil that's bearing 30, 60 to 100 times what was sown. Instead of the soil that gets choked out by the deceitfulness of wealth, or his focus on making five bags of gold from the five we were given, instead of kind of the last-resort guy who Jesus says, well, at least you could have invested in and made interest at the bank. It's kind of like his last resort, right? It's not bad but it was not nearly as good as the guy who made impact. Now, with the blessings that He was given now, and for all kinds of other reasons to which we might talk about, we wanted to focus on both creating human interest even more than creating financial interests or investments. And we have plenty of investments too. So, there's nothing wrong with that. It's just a matter of balancing those well, to make sure that you're not missing the vision and commands that Jesus Himself gives us.
DC: This is great, I've got a couple of questions that come off of that one real quick with your cap that you set on your income. Did you mark that to inflation? Or have you lived on that same expenditure level, even though the value of the dollar has gone down?
JD: Yeah, no, I, first of all, I think there's nothing wrong with adjusting that for inflation. So if so if people do that, that's totally fine, obviously. And of course, this cap is no one's but our own. And so I want to emphasize that very clearly, living expenses are different elsewhere. Obviously, people starting points are different and all of that. But we did not adjust that for inflation. So we've kept that exactly the same. For the last 10 years, it's been that same monetary cap, and honestly, because we were prepared for that and our mindsets. And because we kind of had already lived on that when we decided to start making that our cap it. It has not been at all heart, we only check once a year, actually how much we're spending. Because we know every literally every single year except for one, there was one year that we had a lot of housing expenses. But there was only one year where it was even like, oh, we should actually maybe cut back a little bit. And it's important to note too, that we're not living in a cardboard box. We live in a nice house we have I mean, it's not a wealthy neighborhood by any means. But we live in a very comfortable house, we have everything we need. We go on family vacations. My wife and I are going to South Carolina next week for our own vacation. It's not like you know, you have to like flog yourself to do this sort of thing. It just takes preparation and expectations are everything as we all know, right? Just preparing your mindset for that.
DC: Right. Another question I had was, as you're looking at ROI, I've read a lot on this and talk to others and it seems like there's a common difficulty with nonprofits defining what kind of return we're trying to get here because within the for-profit world, it's always obvious it's about per dollar. But in the nonprofit world, it seems every ministry, every organization has a different metric by which they're measuring success. How do you navigate that?
JD: Yeah, that's a great question. And of course, it's one we're very intimately related to as we assess impact per dollar, especially with Christian causes. So as a physician, it's a lot easier to do this on the humanitarian side, because you can look at objective criteria, like a mortality benefit that you can measure and a percentage or disease prevalence decrease, or, you know, how many people were vaccinated, and you know, the vaccination rate and what that protects people from. So it's a lot easier to retrospectively and objectively measure numbers robustly and create metrics that are real and that are important. But I think it's worth noting that even then, a lot of nonprofits that are doing humanitarian work, don't focus on those metrics. They'll focus on much more nebulous ones, like in people impacted, or how many people we gave meals to, well, that's great. But if he gave meals to people who didn't need the nutrients they were getting from those meals, or people who didn't need the extra calories to begin with, or people who already have 20 other organizations feeding them, or who can get government aid and get food stamps, you're not really creating any impact, no matter how many meals you throw out there.
DC: So often these metrics can be unhelpful.
JD: Exactly. And so from a humanitarian standpoint, it's very important to look for metrics that actually prove impact, not prove service. We like to say, it doesn't matter what an organization does, it matters what it did, what it does did right, and to be able to look at not what they do, but what endpoint that that has, which would be a mortality benefit, or some sort of measurable health benefit in that community that can be isolated to that organization. That ends up being important. And so you'll see on Bless Big and other charity evaluators who focus more on objective impact evidence, you'll see that the metrics they use are not what the organization did, but what effect it had on the community. And that ends up being very important. And it's important to make sure the research is good, and isolating that to that organization. So that's not encompassing all of the impact that all other organizations that’s working in that region.
JD: On the Christian side, the metrics are a little bit tougher, because a lot of people want to use and they're tempted to use and this includes churches, numbers that are more on the front end, instead of on the back end, such as people who nebulously came to know Christ, let's say, or made a first-time decision for Christ. I've been in so many different environments where these numbers are just so manipulated, and so exaggerated, whether it's here or abroad, where, you know, you count hands that were raised for people saying they're accepting Christ, and then you know, you'll never hear from them again. Or, or it's the 10th time they've raised their hand because they were just emotionally invested in the experience. And we're like, have to respond to Jesus somehow, right now. And I've even done this in our in our churches that we've gone to, I've literally gone up to folks who have, you know, responded, because I wanted to hear their story and know how to pray for them. And literally 100% of the time, people that have raised their hand as from an invitation to accept the gospel, and were allotted and counted in church statistics as being a first time decision for Christ. I'm not even sure what that expression means.
JD: When you go up to those people 100% of the time, and I actually did this with several, you know, a lot of different people, and they will tell you, oh, I've been a Christian for 20 years, or I'm a seminary student, or, you know, God just did something really great in my life. And I was responding to that right now. I'm not a new Christian, I've had youth pastors say this and respond like this. I mean, it's amazing how many people get caught up in the moment, which is great, and want to respond and do something for God and use this, this emotional moment is kind of a launchpad for them spiritually, which is great. But it does not signify that they're a new convert, let alone a new disciple. And so when you're looking at Christian metrics, even though those are more sexy, and more impressive, when you can put them on pamphlets, and on your internet website, it's much more important, I think, to look at metrics, like how many people completed a six-month discipleship program, or how many people were baptized in this community. And even that can be easily manipulated, but at least they had to take an extra step there. Especially if they were baptized after a weeks or months long period of discipleship and it wasn't at the moment of conversion. I think that's important, too. Or how many churches are now meeting in these communities? And how many people are part of these churches? Right?
JD: And so there's other metrics I could use, but I think we often get caught up on these really, really impressive looking numbers, which are often very vague again, like, you know, people reached for Jesus or, you know, you know, again, first-time decisions for Christ instead of looking at the harder and lower but more important numbers of completed discipleship programs, baptized after, you know, kind of a period of training of a few weeks, or as you know, meetings.
DC: Shows more evidence for a real conversion.
JD: Exactly. And that's important because Jesus doesn't teach us to go make converts, He tells us to make disciples. And I mean, look how many converts he had even a week before he died. People were singing his praises waving palm branches at him on Palm Sunday and five days later, they were shouting crucify him. I mean, and so but those are the numbers that are being published on these nonprofits, pamphlets, and church bulletins is the palm branches. Not that not the people, not the one guy, literally the one disciple and a mom that were at the foot of the cross with Jesus when he died, right?
DC: Right. That's helpful. One small thing that you brought up in your upbringing was interesting to me as a dad myself with three little ones. You said your parents normalized giving your resources outside of yourself? And I'm curious, you know, from a parent's tip, how do you do that? How was that done for you? And how do you do in your own family?
JD: Yeah, well, a huge disclaimer here. I am not a perfect dad. And so I mean, hey, it's a journey for all of us, right? And we figure out how to do that and try our best. And man, I've made mistakes. And so I gotta be open about that. But there are successes that we all have as parents, and we see glimpses of hope, and hopefully, you know, success that we had something to do with. And so even as I struggle, even as I have two boys, they're 9 and 12, right now. And so they're in that preteen age where, you know, like, hygiene and like taking care of things just isn't in their brains. And so that can be frustrating. But the cool thing is, in my own life, when this example was given to me as a child, and I think in my children's lives now, in some very specific ways, we're seeing the fruit of that coming from them and not coming from us. And so I think the two biggest things that Laura and I have done, and by the grace of God,
JD: I feel like have stuck with our kids, at least for the time being and pretty consistently. The first one is that we talk about giving an impact and people around the world all the time. And so it's very normal for our kids to be thinking about kids their age all over the globe, needs all over the globe, diseases they'll never experience, but know a lot about like malaria or parasitic worms, or it's not like we're having dinnertime conversations about this sort of thing. But at the same time, they're very used to the world's problems. And they don't think the only people that need help are the homeless guy that they see, you know, down the street, or, you know, that elderly person that they know. And of course, those people are very important too. But everybody cares about those people, because they see them all the time, right?
And, so for them just to very normally think about themselves in a global context And as a global part of a global body, I think it's just very normal for them. And also that giving is normalized for them to where it's almost like it would be weird for them not to consider giving to people in need around the world and only to be thinking about people locally, if you're even thinking about them at all. That would actually be weird for them in first, you know, 95% of the rest of Americans. I think that's that's the norm. And so I think that that piece of it is clearly borne fruit and that our kids will all the time make comments about people around the world or problems around the world that very few kids would talk about, just because it's part of our normal conversation. I think more concretely, what we've done that I think is really helped is we actually split their piggy bank into three compartments.
JD: So we actually bought a little three-part kind of like little desk supply, you know, kind of a container for both of our kids. And we write on the three compartments, spend a save, and someone else. And so those are the three compartments, and we put a verse on each one of those compartments that has to do with those three things. And so we want to teach them that it's okay to spend money, it's okay to enjoy that. So the resources you have, and they get to do that with a third of their income, which is not very big, but it's still something. And so they do that with their allowance, they can spend it whenever they want and go to the store or the dollar store, they can buy some candy, whatever. For the second third is to save and they can only spend that every six months. And so that teaches them of course, the value of accumulating savings and not spending right away and being able to bear the fruit of that and get more for that every six months when they can kind of release that little compartment.
And then the someone else compartment is the third third of their income. And what's been cool about that is that's become again a very normal thing for them. And so my kid made over 30 bucks at a lemonade stand a month ago, which is kind of obscene, but also kind of awesome at the same time. But he did, he made $32 in like two hours, which is great for him. Of course, yeah. And without saying a word to him, we were gonna let him just put it all on his safe compartment because you know, that's fine. Um, he had divided that into thirds without us saying a word and said, hey, where can I spend this? Where's the need in the world that kids need this right now? And I'm not saying that that came from me. I'm just saying that when you see that coming from them and it's not prompted by us or not something that's led by us. It's amazing.
And my other child, my 12-year old when we do our impact updates every month and are looking at how much everybody gave to Bless Big and where they gave and how much impact that traded. He loves sitting there with me and being like, oh, you know, where do people give? Well, that's so cool. Well, that makes so much sense. And just to develop that love for that. I mean, what more rewarding thing is there for a parent or a loved one. It's not just that you feel good as a parent, it's that you're proud of your kids. And you're just like this, these kids are awesome. I wish I was even close to this when I was 12. You know, we're 25 for that matter, right. And it's just so cool to see that be so easy and natural for them. And we're hoping, you know, pray to God, that that, that he continues that journey, so that is as seamless for them when they become adults as it was for us and that it happens even sooner for them. So I think sometimes we underestimate with our children, and with our spouses too, or even our parents and loved ones, we underestimate how much impact we can have with advocacy in that way.
JD: They need to see examples of people caring about this stuff and people giving, not just later, but now so that they're able to be like, oh, yeah, that actually makes sense. And I know that somebody actually successfully did it. And that extends not just to your family, of course, but to all of your peers, and to the business partners you have and to the people around you that advocacy component is so huge when you're doing that. And I mean, I've had multiple people come up to me and say, You're the only person I know that I can say, is successfully doing this and not just planning to do it. And that's not because I'm great. It's just because they don't they just don't see that very often.
DC: Yeah. And they don't advocate people, don't talk about their giving enough. And it could be happening behind closed doors everywhere but they're ashamed of it.
JD: And that's why we've started doing it. It's because we share those stories, like I was mentioned, not just from my dad, but from people we never even met. And if I didn't know those stories, I wouldn't have a realistic model to be like, I can do that myself, right. And it's so even just hearing that story gives us a real example, to be able to say, hey, I can do this, and I want to do it. And I'm excited to do it. And it's almost like a kind of a competition. Like, if that person can do it, I can do it too. You know, I mean, the type A people that like it's like game on, you know, that's a challenge, I want to I can do that, you know. So anyway,
DC: I'm a big believer in giving the resources God's given to us unlocks so much joy and freedom in our lives. And when you get to experience that joy you want to share with others, like, look what I did. It isn't about me, it's just, it's freeing to release it, right?
JD: I love that. It's like, look what you can do. It's like your ears, your, I mean, I hear all these complaints about people about their second home, you know, the landscaping getting destroyed, or like, you know, they didn't get to use their boat at all this year, or they, you know, is in the marina the whole time. And none of these things are bad. And there's nothing wrong with a second home or a boat or whatever, you know, you're buying. But I don't hear positive things nearly as often as I hear negative things.
JD: And I'm thinking this whole time, I guarantee you, you would be so much more excited about your life, and so much happier if you didn't have to deal with any of that stuff. And instead, we're really, really just loving the fact that your resourcesare creating this much health around the world, are bringing Jesus to this many people around the world, are seeing this many people discipled. I mean, God created us for that kind of impact. And it's not wrong at all, to have things and to enjoy those things. And that's great. But from what I see, and from what financial advisors tell me, it's the people that are using those resources as a means to the end of being who God created them to be that are, by far, the most fulfilled than people who are just using resources as the end in and of itself.
DC: Right. Absolutely.
DW: So Jay, we've been talking a lot about Bless Big and how you've found the most impactful charities and nonprofits. Can you share one investment or gift that you've given that has had the greatest impact? Or maybe one that you're like most excited about? Just to give us a little context?
JD: Yeah, sure. I think, I would say there's three answers to that, because I want to hit three different places you can invest? Well, I'll be brief about it, but I'll do four. So from a purely financial kind of investment, where you can just give money. One place that we've been most excited about, and that has consistently really shown just a very high impact per dollar from an evangelism and discipleship standpoint is there are several organizations that can name but “Faith Comes by Hearing” has been one of the most exciting places for us to give. And it's not because we have any relational or emotional or familial connection with them at all. We'd never heard of them at all before we started doing this metric, merit-based giving. But one model that they have that is so awesome is just using audio scripture in a church planting environment and the reason that model is so fantastic is because most of the people are, not most, but many of the people who have not heard about Jesus are illiterate. And so even if you give them the Bible in their language, they can't process it or read it or understand it. But the audience, scripture not only allows them to do that and spread it very easily, but they're distributed on solar-powered devices that don't require any sort of batteries, don't require any sort of maintenance and can be spread very easily throughout closed countries because they basically are mp3 players. And so you can put your own songs on them. And they can very easily be distributed throughout a lot of closed areas because it doesn't look like a Bible, number one. Because it's not only a Bible but because it has all kinds of discipleship resources and scripture on it. So there's not one model, of course, that does evangelism or discipleship correctly. This is just one that we found to be from a third-party standpoint, really robustly proven. And that has a model that really works prospectively and retrospectively.
DC: Before you move on, what is the metric of success we use for Faith Comes by Hearing? And what are those numbers looking like?
DW: Difficult business guy question.
JD: Yes. No, that's, that's a very important question. So, the metrics of success for that are, first of all, how many people were able to use this resource and respond with a desire to enroll in discipleship programs. And so that's, that's important, because it's a response that's more than just an at the moment response, that would be a conversion thing. But then also people who complete discipleship programs. And so those are the metrics. And when you look at it, this pretty consistent impact metrics has been $50 results in between 35 and 40 people responding in that way. And so I mean, it's, it's, if you think about it, I mean, one device, of course, can reach hundreds and hundreds of people if it's continually distributed around and because it doesn't need batteries, or really any typical means I have one of these devices, they gave me one. And it's like a brick. I mean, the thing is, it could survive a nuclear war. Like, right, exactly. It's not like a little cheap mp3 player. I mean, this thing's the big honkin thing. But it also, you know, can be used pretty much anywhere, and especially where electricity and you know, batteries are not easy to come by sometimes. So that's on that side.
JD: And of course, there are many other organizations, I could mention, I don't want to single them out as the only one. Of course, from the humanitarian side, we tend to really focus on the secular researchers because honestly, from a physician standpoint, from a scientific standpoint, they do an incredible job really evaluating where the highest impact per dollar is. But I'll give you two examples on one each secular and Christian. The first one right now the highest impact per dollar organization right now, that research for years and years and years has really, really demonstrated to be the highest impact per dollar is “Helen Keller international’s Vitamin A Supplementation Program”. Not only does it prevent blindness, in a lot of kids, but from a per life save standpoint, it has the lowest cost per life saved, which is right around $3,500, which on a large scale is incredible. If right now, on average, the US is willing to spend through all of its programs, around $5 million per life saved, that's what it considers is we're spending for life saved. And that's what it costs to really save a life on a large scale here in the US, because problems are a lot more complex and difficult to solve and more expensive.
So if you compare $5 million per life saved to $3,500, for life saved, I mean, it's just crazy, effective compared to, I mean, we've solved all the problems that money solves here, we have an abundance of money here. And so people aren't dying of malaria, they're not dying of parasitic infections that are intestines, they're not dying of, of, you know, dirty water, or parasites in their water, these things we've solved. So we only have the complex, difficult problems left that money doesn't do a good job with and for those problems, it's better for us to really focus on using our time and our advocacy and our education. Because we understand this culture and can engage with those resources. Whereas money in the rest of the world, you know, especially the developing nations is so much more effective hundreds, even 1000s of times more effective. So that's on the secular side.
The Christian organization that I feel does the most highest impact for dollar humanitarian work is “Never Thirst” which is a clean water systems organization. And the thing I love about their model, which I think a lot of Christians would be excited about, is that they actually really first have to say they have the community invest. So the community has to put up money and create an account to be able to do their own work and sustain that. But then they use the local businesses and local economies for all the work that's been done to do the water projects and they create a pastor liaison and a local church there as the point person for that whole project. And so what that does is obviously stimulate the local economy instead of bringing in everybody else's work and resources so economically benefits that community. It obviously gives them a sustainable clean water system that there's money and resources to to invest in and keep maintained that the community has already bought into but even better, it's the pastor that is the face of that project, and therefore is able to be bringing this clean water and the living water, of course, through his church and through that ministry, to that community as well.
And of course, most of these Arab communities that are receiving these projects are also some of the least-reached communities on the planet with the gospel. And so from an impact standpoint, with the Vitamin A supplementation program, every $50 is about 18 people that are able to get vitamin A supplementation program, and on a large scale, $3,500 would cause someone to be alive and usually among young children with a lot of life years left, so you're getting a lot of life years out of this, to be alive, who would otherwise be dead, which is the best deal you can get on a large scale. From a never thirst standpoint, it's about 30 people that are provided with water for drinking clean water for drinking per for a whole year, for every $50 that you give. That's also just incredible. The way that they've set up their ministry, they use all kinds of different water systems as well. Some are solar-powered, some are wells, some are just all good. Whatever needs to be served, in what way what part of whatever's best for the region of interest? So those are just a few examples of just how you can have just incredible impact. If you just click one button that's different, where you're giving them than another, which is amazing.
DC: You mentioned you were going to do for I'm eager to hear that fourth, the fourth biggest…
JD: Thank you for reminding me that. So those are three organizations. The fourth piece of investing that I think is very important is to remember that you're doing advocacy investing, too. So it's the whole, “Teach a man to fish” thing. And this is why again, it's so important not just to focus on where you're giving but to also have an advocacy platform where you're encouraging others to do the same. Obviously, you can be an incredibly successful investor. And you can, in the ideal situation you're doing so to compound your income compound your bottom line someday for the greatest benefit to the kingdom of God. And even if you do end up getting all of that compounded interest and investments away, someday, you'll still never even be close to as impactful as you could have been, if you had even taken a third of that, or even a quarter of that, or even a 10th of that those resources invested in advocacy to people around you.
And so right now, for example, we obviously give to Bless Big charities, because we believe in them wholeheartedly. But in the two years that we've existed, and keep in mind, I'm not a public speaker, or, you know, finance, you know, guy or I don't have any influence over people's money, I'm just a physician. So, financially speaking, I don't have this huge clout. And yet, you know, you know, a huge amount of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars every year in two years that are being given away, I've come from people who never would have given to these organizations at all.
And that's important too, because if you're only networking with people who are already going to give to these organizations because you're only kind of hanging out with like-minded people, then you're not even creating that much impact, because they were probably already going to give anyway to these organizations. But when you're working with your peers who have no knowledge of these things, and when you're giving them an example of that giving, and not just giving them information about high impact giving, but showing them and getting excited with them about organizations that you're kind of choosing together, I mean, you're you're at least doubling your impact with one person that you're advocating to. And if you're advocating to hundreds of people, that's a huge multiplier. That's just, that's just amazing that you can never ever achieve by compounding your own financial assets.
DC: Right. So it sounds like this is more of a not so much about giving your finances but about being generous with your influence.
JD: Exactly. Exactly. And being strategic with it. I think Yeah. I mean, it's you said it pretty well there, I mean, to really focus and that's, that's, that's an investment people don't think about, I don't think about an investment of advocacy, they think about an investment of money, which of course is great. But man, you teach 10 men to fish, and you're going to be far more impactful than than just becoming the best fisherman that you could possibly make yourself. Right. Wow.
DW: Yeah, absolutely. Hey, Jay, I wanted to mention real quick, because I think this is really important, that Bless Big is completely underwritten by donors, separate from any donation that is going through the website. And so, you know, that's really important to me, because it means that you're a third-party resource for anybody who wants to give and you're just looking at the data, analyzing the data, and finding the best opportunities and the best investments for for the givers. And so they can really utilize that information for free.
DC: No worry about the admin overhead, Bless Big needs to keep running.
JD: And that is important. That is very important. Yeah. So we wanted to do that from the get go. I mean, God has blessed my wife and I with enough resources that just by ourselves, we underwrite all the marketing and website and hosting expenses, and that's totally fine. Like it's not that expensive. The way that we do it, of course, you can spend an endless amount on marketing if you've been promotional materials if you want to, and maybe we should spend more I don't know. But at the same time, that is something we never wanted people to question. And the easiest way for them not to question it is to not have to look at a big foreign form 990 just to remove that whole component altogether. And then people can know that this is really a passion project to be able to say, look, we have spent hundreds and hundreds of hours, not just us. But with humanitarian experts around the world, I talk to groups that are doing charity evaluation research all the time. I've been invited to be part of the Charity Navigator ratings team, as a consultant. I work with the GiveWell ratings team, probably the best scientific evaluator of charities that's out there. I just talked to their ratings team last week about the metrics and how to do those things. So I mean, so we work very closely with very, very skilled experts on this sort of thing. It's not just us doing this on our own. And all around the world, we collaborate and have discussions all the time with people that are really, really into this stuff about where to do this in the best way, partly because we're investing a lot of money ourselves in this.
And we wanted to make sure that we get the biggest ROI, not just for God, but also you know, there's a component of it, where I don't want to waste my money, right. And that's not selfish. But also, we want to be able to, you know, for people who ask us just to be able to throw something and say, This is a cause you level here, consider giving here, I know, you've never heard of it. But it's going to make your money, literally 100, maybe even 1000 times more impactful than just the place you were familiar with, or that somebody suggested to you or that somebody you knew was on the board of or something like that, it makes a huge difference in the end.
It's the impact and blessing to the kingdom and a global body of Christ into the head of the body itself that's far more important than us being like, oh, I gave where it was comfortable or where it was familiar, right? So we wanted people to be able to maximize that right off the bat. By knowing that 100% of every penny they give goes to these organizations that are having the highest impact, and never ever comes to us at all. So yeah, appreciate you mentioning that. But that's definitely what was a core principle of less big from its get-go. It's not wrong at all, to have a budget, obviously, and to have and to need to raise support, to be able to do all of these things as an organization, all the organizations, we recommend do that. But we didn't want to be a second middleman in that road to be decreasing the amount of impact people could have.
DC: What it let's say a giver, a donor wanted to vet a specific ministry or organization that they've had a heart for, and they believe is doing good work, but they're just not sure. Is that something that maybe a donor could say, mey, can I pay for your consultation and resources to give me some answers on how well this organization is doing?
JD: Yeah, no, we actually have people do that quite frequently, I would say the first thing if you're listening and are considering asking someone about how to vet a charity, go into it with an open mind, I think a lot of people that ask us want us just to affirm the charity that they bring to us. And so they'll ask us about a tiny charity that one of their friends started, you know, somewhere in the world, and they'll say, I really liked this charity, you know, what do you think about it, and all they want to hear is, this is great, and you should give to it, right? They just want kind of some sort of third-party confirmation. And that's there's nothing wrong with that, obviously, you know, we kind of smile with them, but try to work with them through that. So go into it with an open mind realizing that you're probably if you're going to someone who really does know what they're talking about, you're going to get a recommendation that's probably not familiar to you, or maybe that you weren't anticipating.
But if you want to do that, well, and I'm not saying it has to be through Bless Big, if you want to do it independently, I'll just tell you two places to go that will get you maybe half the way there besides less big if you want to if you want if you're okay, like considering secular charities and really want to make the biggest humanitarian impact, give well.org is a fantastic resource. They've actually significantly reduced the number of organizations they're recommending to only four right now, but they are stellar. Just phenomenal organizations. And the funding gap is huge for these organizations right now as well, which is part of the reason they're recommended by them. So it's limited in that there's only four but they are for just incredible organizations that no Christian would find objectionable in any way. They deal with malaria prevention, childhood vaccinations and vitamin A supplementation and Helen Keller is one of them.
From a Christian standpoint, if you really want to focus on the evangelism and discipleship and church planning piece, I would say “ROI Ministries”is the best place to go. Some of you may have heard of that resource. They have a third party come in, an auditing party that specializes in charity evaluation. So they're not even doing the evaluating themselves, but hire a third-party group to come in who does that well, and then process that data and give you recommendations. We use both of them as primary charity evaluators of the 22 that we incorporate for Bless Big but we also take into consideration many other types of charity evaluation models, like those coming from Charity Navigator or Charity Watch or the ECFA for Christian organizations or ministry watch things like that because we want to give you the biggest across the board organizations that also allows us to expand the number of cause groups and organizations we recommend because if you combined ROI ministry and give, you'd only have 14 organizations to choose from. And that would leave out about like 90% of cause groups that people might be interested in. So, but I do want to give you those because obviously, we're not the only people doing this. And there are great groups with amazing hearts for Jesus and for the world that really should be promoted. And I want you to know about them too.
DC: Awesome, thank you so much for those resources.
DW: So Jay, this is kind of taking it a little bit different direction. But we've talked a lot about how successful it's been to really analyze all of these charities in and we know that we have, you know, we learn a lot from success, but we learn even more from failure. And what are some of the things along the road where you've come across different failures or had different failures? And what have you learned from those?
JD: Yeah, that's a great question. And I think it kind of leads to this acknowledgment that there is no way to perfectly evaluate, you know, organizations and charities. And it's important to throw a caveat in there to say that, that doesn't mean that the charity you already happen to like is equal to other charities. And that is important because a lot of people, including myself, at times, I want to use it as an excuse to say, well, there's no perfect way to do this, I'm just going to keep getting what I'm giving, or I'm just not even going to think about it because it's too overwhelming. And that's a very real danger that causes us to cost millions of lives every year, and keeps millions of people from hearing the gospel. So it's a dangerous mentality. But you still have to respect the truth, the nugget of truth in there that it's very difficult to really do this well.
And so I think, for our own mistakes, and our own lessons that we've learned, the first one is to really think that initially, it was easy for us not to evaluate as deeply as we needed to. The true value of the actual research that was done by these organizations. And so sometimes you will look at an impact statement, and you just take the numbers that you see. And even though it's a third-party assessment that that's a lot better than the first-hand statistic on somebody's website, you have to really dig into the research and see what they actually did, and what quality of research there was. Obviously, it's very easy to throw out a number. But if that number is based on a study that was poorly designed, or that didn't include enough, big enough sample size, or didn't have enough statistical power, it's, it's not worth a whole lot, honestly. And I've seen people make decisions about where they give based off of one study that happened 30 years ago in a population of 16 people, and only had like a 1% benefit of the opposite outcome, which is literally like flipping a coin. And it's, you know, and yet they're devoting their kind of advocating for this organization based on that. I'm just like, yeah, you can show me a study that says that it was effective in this population. But the study was so poorly designed that he did absolutely nothing right.
Now, I'm not expecting everybody to have familiarity enough with doing research on that level, to go through all the research, and like, pick out the best organizations, but that's why we exist. That's why GiveWell exists. That's why our ministry exists to do that all for you. And that's what they're doing. And they're experts at that. So, for us, I think what we're doing, we're doing a recommendation revamp toward the end of this year, hopefully right before giving season starts in November. But we are incorporating seven more charity evaluators than we did before, some of which are very, very good. So right now we have 15. But then we'll have 22 in our new set of recommendations.
And we have a much better handle on the quality of the research that's being done and where they're getting the research from. So that we can wait the value of the impact numbers of each of these evaluators appropriately, and then make our final assessments based on not just how many, or evaluators are recommending these orgs. And not just on the impact statistics that each of them are giving. But to be able to weigh the more much more robust evaluators more highly so that in the end of the recommendations and ratings that we give are much more accurate.
And so I would say that that has been a consistent learning process for us to be able to really be able to weigh the evaluators that we use. Well, I think the the other, I guess, learning point, and you could say mistake or growing point for us, has been to really consider some of the non-measurable pieces of all of this. And of course, we knew that from the outset that you know, there are some metrics you just can't measure that are still important in a quality of life metrics, things like that. Now, the groups that we talked to, the “Effective Altruism” group, a lot of these charity evaluators. They do take those things into consideration. And they do talk to populations that have lower quality of life that's harder to measure and say, How would you quantify this like blindness, let's say, you know, if you weren't blind, how many years of life would you be willing to give up of your life expectancy to not be blind, let's say right?
JD: And so they're letting these people kind of quantify you know, have the deficit that they have by their more nebulous kind of, you know, disability or difficulty or whatever. So, people are trying to objectify that. But at the same time, it's difficult. And you have to acknowledge that. And so I think for us to really think through the whole process, and not just say the only thing that matters is a number that we can say your dollar is going to get for you. But to incorporate into that, you know, some quality of life issues, relative need issues, especially like, yeah, this organization is really impactful. But there's all kinds of other people in that area already serving and all that sort of thing, to just take some of those intangibles more and to incorporate those into our ratings as well. And also ask people who are suffering from a lot of these more intangible, you know, kind of needs, like how they would quantify that in comparison to something we can measure. And that helps us to be able to take the whole picture into consideration more holistically. And again, there's no perfect way to do that. But we at least want that to be a huge component to what we're doing so that when people come to us and say, well, not, you know, things, things that you can't measure are important, too, we can say, Yes, we have actually taken that into consideration.
DW: Absolutely. So as we want to really grow in our generosity, is there anything, keys to growing in generosity that you have found in your experience?
JD: Well, as you can tell, I haven't focused any of this podcast or my answers on just how to make your investments more successful, right, at least not from a financial standpoint. And I've purposely done that for two reasons. One, because I'm not an expert in finance. And so I want the experts in finance, especially those on this podcast to be the ones doing that and listen to them, when they're telling you investment strategies because that's not what I'm focusing on. But I'm also doing that, because there that that is where most people do focus. Most people do focus on how I can invest better how I can, you know, use different vehicles to be more successful, when to invest, obviously, all of those things, and they're all important. But I think that the needs that aren't focused on there are two things. The first is the mindset that investing to not just start out investing to maximize your financial portfolio, but to start with a mindset of human interest, and not just financial interest, right. And I love the model of investment that says, I am going to devote more resources now to human interest that will compound to people who are going to be alive instead of dead, raise families contribute to their communities to be able to give and advocate themselves forgiving, because they're alive and healthy. And because they know Jesus and can evangelize and disciple themselves.
Over the next 40 years, I'm going to invest at least as much resources in that right now as I am in my investments for Sunday, when I can give off of the fruit that those who have worn, right. Yeah. And that does, that does three very important things. It allows you to create much more impact overall, because you are creating impact now that compounds that allows you to advocate a lot better, right? Because you can actually show from a model of giving not just from suggestions to people that how to do that successfully. But it actually obeys Jesus, I think much more accurately, too. I mean, look at Jesus, Jesus was always going where people were needed doing what they needed, right than meeting them at their point of need. Now, everything he teaches, and most of which we've visited already in Scripture is about not building bigger barns, but about going to where there's people who are harassed and helpless and helping them right, and creating impact now. So I mean, I think, you know, come back to the answer to your question, that first point that's so important is to devote more resources, at least at least at least as much to human interest, for the sake of your own impact for the sake of advocacy, in fact, and for the sake of simply following Jesus.
The second piece that I think is really important, is to learn where resources do the best work. And so for instance, we haven't reversed in our country, oftentimes, we'll use our time to help people abroad, when we don't understand the culture, when we don't know the language, when we don't know how to help these people best. We go on these very expensive missions trips, all over the world, and they're not bad, and they can be very fruitful. And I've been on many of them. And so I'm not trying to shame this. But we tend to spend our time doing things for time isn't always very beneficial, and then spend our money where things aren't very beneficial on a monetary standpoint, we'll throw all kinds of money at problems in this country where money just hasn't succeeded in solving these problems. These populations and needs are important. It's just that money has proven over the last 50 years to do very little for them.
And we can all think of cost groups and populations through that money just has not helped very much. And so instead, think about where these resources do have the most impact for people with mental illness in our country. You know, their culture, you can communicate with them, you can understand them and then your time with them is worth a mountain of gold compared to the people throwing a pile of money at them. Especially if they have health insurance or means, you know, programs to help them out. They can use money for sure, but they need time more.
The same could be said about the elderly population, or different needs in our country, like, like needs to evolve from gender inequality or racial inequality, right? We've thrown billions of dollars at those things, and they have not significantly improved. But there's advocacy ways or education ways for us to use those resources instead. But then use your money where your money is going to have 1000s of times the impact around the world where the easily solve problems by money have not yet been solved, right. So those two things are, I think, the most important things from an investment standpoint that you're not going to hear from people who are very good at maximizing your financial investments. There's just so that's that's kind of, I want to hope to at least kind of talk about things that you're not going to hear from everyone else, from someone who has experience and those things instead of experience where you're going to be able to maximize your financial portfolio.
DW: That's helpful. Jay, in your experience, who's the most influential person that you know? And how have they impacted you?
JD: Well, I can give you the cheater answer and say, Jesus, because that's true. Sorry, I had to say it, because it's his teachings just permeate every person that has influenced me. And all the scripts that we've talked about in this example, of course, are just so paramount. But I would say the, I would say there's two people that have been the most influential, the first is my dad. And it's because he, I think, more than anyone normalized, just even though he didn't know a lot about what was going on in the world, and very few people did at that time, when I was growing up. We didn't have the internet yet, of course, but he normalized, thinking about using money as a means to the end of bearing fruit for God. And he's learned a lot since then. And he's, you know, we work together and have a blast doing it right now. But I think he more than anyone just made that a normal thing for and can't just kind of like, it would be weird if I didn't do this type of a thing, you know, in my life. And so I hope everyone has somebody like that in their life, because that did influence me a lot.
I don't know if it's one person, but I would say the small group of people that really, really introduced me to how you can be far more effective with your money than if you simply gave it to places that were well meant, and well-intentioned, but only based on emotional or kind of relational familiarity. I had no idea, I thought I was doing a great job honestly, like giving to biblical populations. And giving places that, you know, even even on a quick Charity Navigator kind of evaluation seemed to be decent, even when I was doing a little bit of an analysis, I wasn't even coming close to the impact I could have, when I was really, really, you know, focusing a little bit more on where the research tells you is, is a great place to give. And so I think the people in my life that really suggested that to me and gave me of vehicles or websites or information to go off of probably have been the most impactful of all simply because logistically, switching your money from one place to another can have such a huge increase in the fruit that you bear for the kingdom of God.
And so I have to I mean, I definitely need to mention those people. And you know, those people come from all over, they come from GiveWell. They come from Effective Altruism for Christians group, they come from individuals who have shown examples of that, and just been willing to open their mind up to places that they never would have considered otherwise. But those that small group of people has been very influential for me, which I'm thankful for.
DW: Jay, is there a particular book or podcast or piece of information that has really changed the course of your life that you can recommend for us? Yeah.
JD: And I won't give the obvious generic answer. So what else instead not the Bible, and read the Bible, it's actually really important. Obviously, not just forgiving and making them bad, but because this whole thing is about relationship with God. But I think honestly, the biggest, the biggest and most impactful resource I've ever read was doing good better by will McCaskill who is not a Christian, but he's one of the leaders of the Effective Altruism movement. Now, I want to make sure I throw out the caveat, I do not align myself with some of the components of the Effective Altruism movement or to some of its proponents. So I just want to make sure that that said, and I don't think all of their priorities are some things that Christians wouldn't support and or should support. But he has steered clear from a lot of that and really focused on this book, particularly doing good better. Will McCaskill ma see as kll on really helping people understand why being open minded to giving in different places is so very important and impactful. And honestly, a lot of his points sound a lot like the same points. Jesus makes about impact. And he puts a lot of research behind it and helps you see through things and gives you just good powerful analogies and statistics that are really important for Christians, especially to realize that places we often tend to give or are encouraged to give, tend to not be anywhere near as impactful as they could be. If we really want to advance the Kingdom of Jesus. And so I would recommend that book, honestly, to anybody, especially the first half of it, he gets pretty technical in the second half, but you get the idea by that time, what it's all about. But I think it's a really good book you can share with anybody, Christian or non-Christian. And that's another powerful aspect of it is that, you know, your non-Christian friends would be able to appreciate and value just as much as, as Christian people. So,
DW: Jay, as we wrap up this episode, is there anything that we can be praying for, for you and your family? Thank you.
JD: Yeah, and I definitely want to know, the same for you. I know a little bit, and I'm praying for you guys, but I think really, it's probably the heart of any parent is just to have wisdom, and how to navigate each phase of childhood. And as our kids get into the teenage phase, which is a big black box, for most parents, of course, you know, just to really help them to do that well, and help them to know how to really foster their own independence while still being able to pour into their lives in the way that God intended us to, especially with just behavioral things that are difficult for us to know what to do it right. And both for ourselves, but also for our children, and every parent has to deal with that. So, you know, I think we just want to do the best we can as parents, and you know, I think just for the wisdom to do that would be great.
And I do think also, as we put out our 2.0 version, really of less vague as we update our charity recommendations to just have God's supernatural wisdom and bring us the people that know the information we need to know to really include a lot of those more holistic concerns, but also make sure that we're weighing the research well, and being as responsible as we can with the recommendations that we're making. We obviously want nothing more than for people just to be able to make the biggest difference they can for the kingdom of Christ, and for the benefit of our global neighbors. And so we just want God to be have his hand in that as much as possible. So those are the two things I would definitely say.
DW: All right, well, let's pray now. Thank you. God, I thank you and praise you for this time. I thank you for Jay and his family, I pray that you would give them wisdom as parents, Lord. It's a learning experience every day. And we we trust in you, we we rely on you and we want to grow calls for you each day. I pray for our listeners that they would use all the stuff that we talked about, to further your kingdom to advance your kingdom and invest in your kingdom. In Jesus name I pray, amen.
JD: Amen. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that.
DW: Thank you, Jay for coming on the show. Really appreciate it. And for your time and everything. Thank you to the kingdom investors for listening to the show and sharing with your friends. Let's take what was learned and invest in God's kingdom.
JD: Thank you for all you're doing out there, Body of Christ. It's a privilege to be working with you. So thank you so much for every every niche that you are playing and God's global body.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[OUTRO]
ANNNOUNCER: What if you could take your generosity to the next level, impacting more lives in your community and around the world, creating a godly legacy for generations to come?
Now you can. Your first step is crafting your kingdom investing thesis. Reserve your spot in our next online workshop where we guide you through the process of discovering your passions, create a strategic plan and connect you to opportunities that will help you fulfill your God-given calling as a kingdom investor. Register today by clicking the link in the show notes.
Thanks for listening. Don't forget to subscribe and we'll see you next time for another episode of The Kingdom Investor Podcast.
[END]