In 2007, my husband David and I traveled on a mission trip to what is now South Sudan. The country was emerging from a brutal 25-year civil war, and its people were returning home with little more than tarps and sacks of grain. The resilience and determination of the South Sudanese were unmistakable. So was the weight of what they were carrying.

On the last night of our trip, the women from the church we’d been serving with asked to meet. We gathered inside a modest mud hut, probably ten of us, in the dim light, standing close. They shared their dreams and their struggles. Their deep desire to provide for their families. Their hunger to rebuild something real.

Then one woman spoke up. Through a translator, she said:

“If only we had a sewing machine, we could start a business, earn an income, and send our children to school.”

I’ve thought about that moment a thousand times since. She wasn’t asking for a handout. She was asking for an opportunity. She already knew what she would do with it. She just needed someone to believe she could.

I couldn’t shake it on the flight home. I couldn’t shake it for months.

From Conviction to Action

David and I came back to Dallas changed. We started talking with organizations that provide Christ-centered economic empowerment around the world. We immersed ourselves in research. We wrestled with what it really means to help, and how often “helping” inadvertently communicates that the people receiving it aren’t capable of helping themselves.

What we kept coming back to was a model built on empowerment, not charity, rooted in community, opportunity, and the Gospel. Tools, training, and the transformative power of Jesus, given to people who were capable and made in the image of God with inherent worth and dignity. The specific tools would evolve over time. But that conviction never changed.

In 2009, in partnership with the local South Sudanese church, we co-founded Seed Effect. Our mission was clear: to bring Jesus and economic empowerment to the hard places.

We began by disbursing our first microloans to nineteen entrepreneurs in South Sudan, focusing on empowering individuals, especially women, to break the cycle of poverty and provide for their families with dignity.

What We Didn’t Know Yet

Looking back, that simple request for a sewing machine was a seed that grew into a vision far beyond what we could have imagined. Over time, and in response to ongoing conflict and displacement, our program evolved from credit-led microfinance in South Sudan to savings-led microfinance in the refugee settlements of Northern Uganda.

We redesigned our model around savings groups rather than microloans. Instead of money flowing in from outside, members pool their own resources. They save together, lend to each other, set their own interest rates, and keep their own records. These group belong to them, not to us.

And every meeting opens with prayer and Scripture, because restoration is our end goal and we’ve always believed that true transformation can’t happen apart from the Gospel.