Jeff Rutt: HOPE All Ablaze in Asia

Jeff Rutt, a grand slam Builder of the Year from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, felt a calling to alleviate physical and spiritual poverty in developing countries and thus founded HOPE International in 1997.

From JEFF RUTT

Prompted by the depressing situation in post-Soviet Union Ukraine, he came across the concept of microfinance as a poverty alleviation strategy. Together with the Christian vision, HOPE started implementing microenterprise development in Europe, and then spreading to Africa, and then to Asia, the most populous continent in the world.

Despite the prominent economic upturn in Asia, poverty levels have not been subdued in some countries. Obscure families still struggle to access fundamental necessities including jobs, such as in war-stricken Afghanistan. Jeff Rutt and the HOPE team also feel for the 50 million Chinese still living in shortage of wealth and freedom, despite China’s industrial rush in the recent years. The Philippines also has its own statistics of families living below the poverty line, 34 million of them, who direly need solutions that will lead to self-sufficiency.

From JEFF RUTT

It is in the dark of these economic quandaries that HOPE brings its holistic approach to poverty. As a Christian faith-based organization, it develops microfinance services—microloans for Chinese retailers, improving the standard of living of Afghans through microenterprise development, and additional services such as life insurance, health insurance, and housing loans to the Filipinos—while introducing spiritual integration, wherever law abides it, in these Asian countries. The organization believes that physical and spiritual poverty need to be addressed side by side.

From JEFF RUTT

More details about the HOPE impact in Asia can be accessed at www.jeffruttblog.com.