Have you ever tried living on a dollar a day? Some people are living on that budget every single day. What’s worse? They have their whole family to feed on that meager amount. These people don’t have any choice. They believe they will die that way too.
It is saddening to walk by these people without doing anything. Hence, it is a privilege and a responsibility for every person on the planet to be able to help these people living in vulnerable situations. Indeed, one of the ways we can be thankful for what we have is to give forward.
Interested in helping out? Here are some simple options you can help with, even in your own ways.
Livelihood And Skills Training
Dole outs will make vulnerable people reliant on others. Teaching vulnerable people essential life skills is a surefire way to help them get back on their feet. The key here is to help them be self-reliant by enabling them to reach their potential. These people will be able to regain their self-confidence because they will be able to earn their keep.
Keep in mind that psychological health and resilience includes the capacity for positive engagement and connection with the diverse human community, and for managing your life in the unpredictable world we live in. — Douglas LaBier Ph.D.
Our role is to help vulnerable people figure out the things they enjoy doing. From this, we can conduct skills training to enhance what they already know. Some useful skills training can include dressmaking, automotive repair, welding, and baking.
Financial Literacy Training
Most households from vulnerable communities do not even know how to budget their income properly. Even if they are living on a small wage, some families also spend that meager amount for vices such as drinking, smoking, and gambling. To guide them on how to save and to invest their income, financial literacy training can help bridge that gap.
People who volunteer make more money, partially because the relationships people create while volunteering can be leveraged for financial benefit. — Dawn C. Carr MGS, Ph.D.
Financial literacy can help families plan for the future, including the education of their children, saving up for small businesses, or setting up a family home. Financial education is a sure step to help these communities break the cycle of poverty.
Access To Microfinance
One of the most basic and pressing problems of vulnerable communities is their lack of access to financial institutions, in this regard, financial institutions like commercial banks and other formal lending institutions.
Microfinance can provide people living in vulnerable communities access to the loans that they desperately need.
Most people from vulnerable communities resort to illegal activities because they do not have access to loans. Often, only scrupulous loan sharks are the ones providing loans to these communities. Huge interest rates from these loan sharks drive vulnerable people to more poverty. Microfinance seeks to stop this cycle.
Microfinance wants to empower families, especially the women, to start their own enterprises and help their children’s education.
What we can do to help the spread of microfinance is to identify the areas where microfinance is most needed.
Life Coaching
Living a life on the bottom of the food chain is hard. Upon waking up, you see suffering. Your stomach is grumbling. If you are this person, you might be thinking that will have to face endless hardship and suffering. These people from vulnerable communities may believe they are a hopeless bunch, they live and die with no motivation whatsoever.
A way to help out these people struggling with everyday life is through engaging them in meaningful conversation. Life coaching aims to help these people from vulnerable communities enjoy living life again. Life coaching can help people discover what they want and help them find out how to achieve their goals.
With the trust and support of each other, we wrestle with the places where we are challenged to live as nonviolently as we would like, stretching ourselves into strategic discomfort, not beyond what is possible, and growing each month. — Miki Kashtan Ph.D.
In the end, hope is still there for vulnerable communities. Vulnerable communities can break the cycle of poverty by providing them initial livelihood training, financial literacy training, microfinance, and life coaching.