Anyone who works at Ve’ahavta will tell you that I often compare our work – whether it’s leadership, growth, data, finance, accounting, or keeping the office plants looking nice – to parenting. As the mother of six children, I’ve had a lot of opportunities to think about it.

Parenting six very different people over more than thirty years has taught me that human beings grow best when they are deeply supported, deeply believed in, and also challenged to rise to expectations.

People need encouragement, accountability, emotional skills, resilience, and opportunities to do hard things and discover that they are capable of more than they thought they were. Very often, they need a loving kick in the tushie to keep them moving forward when they are stalled.

Not everyone gets those things.

Many people move through life without ever having someone truly believe in them, teach them emotional skills, hold them accountable to a high standard with consistency and care, or help them build confidence in their own capabilities.

One of our clients once said something to me that I have never forgotten. He told me that at Ve’ahavta, he learned things, basic things, like how to organize himself, how to speak to people appropriately, and how to push himself through when things got hard, instead of just giving up.

Then he paused and said, “I guess these are things I should have been taught at home, growing up, but never was. Nobody really asked much from me. They didn’t expect much, either.”

That stayed with me because it speaks to something so much bigger than employment training or poverty.

So much of what determines whether a person flourishes in life comes down to whether someone, somewhere along the way, believed in them and pushed them to realize their potential.

Confidence is not something that is bestowed upon some people, or something that the lucky few are born with. It is something built, fought for, earned through the exertion of doing difficult things and discovering an internal fortitude, a capability wildly greater than expected. That process is the opposite of comfortable, but it is where growth lies.

When people are shielded from challenge, or when expectations of them are low, they internalize the belief that discomfort is intolerable and to be avoided at all costs. And they come to accept the underlying message that they are fragile, incapable, and hopeless.

People naturally rise to the expectations that surround them, and one of the most damaging things we can do to another human being is to expect too little from them.

Many approaches to poverty focus on systemic barriers, past trauma, racism, and discrimination, which are real and can profoundly impact people’s lives. But if we define people and what is possible for them through the lens of victimhood or disadvantage, how can they not internalize that, and believe that growth, responsibility, resilience, and transformation are not really possible for them?

Our approach challenges that narrative.

At Ve’ahavta, we believe people are far more than the worst things that have happened to them or the systems that have failed them. We believe human beings are capable of healing, growing, rebuilding, contributing, and transforming their lives – when they are supported, challenged, and genuinely believed in. 

Real transformation happens not when someone simply hands you things or removes every obstacle from your path, but rather, when someone believes in you enough to hold a high bar for you and keeps you accountable to rising to it even, and perhaps especially, when it’s really hard.

Our approach to poverty combines practical support with emotional support, encouragement, accountability, skill-building, and very high expectations.

We meet people where they are, but we don’t leave them there.

In many ways, I think this approach, like my own approach to raising six unique human beings, is deeply Jewish.

Ours is not a history built on hand wringing or the celebration and enumeration of victimhood. It is a history and culture of resilience and rebuilding; of communities that thrived after extraordinary hardship by refusing to let adversity define them.

Generation after generation, Jews have carried forward the belief that human beings are capable of rising again, of growing stronger, of transforming difficulty into wisdom and strength. Generation after generation, we have held a high bar for ourselves and for each other.

At Ve’ahavta, this is the perspective we bring to people facing poverty.

Life is not easy. Especially if you’re living in poverty. Poverty is strong. But we believe that people are stronger. And with the right supports, delivered the right way, they can come to realize that.

With gratitude,

Cari Kozierok,
CEO, Ve’ahavta