It’s easy to look at the state of the world and feel like there’s nothing you can do.
Drought, hunger, families with no cushion for a bad season—the need is so vast that our own small efforts can feel pointless. We’re told that unless we’re writing enormous checks or fixing everything, everywhere, all at once, our little bit doesn’t really count.
We have never believed that.
From the very beginning, Grain of Hope has been built on a stubborn conviction drawn from Isaiah 58:10—that when you spend yourself on behalf of the hungry, light rises in the darkness. Or, as we’ve always said it more plainly:
The 19 Kids in the Back Room
We know it’s true because we watched it happen. Grain of Hope didn’t start with a corporate board, a massive ledger, or a master plan. It started in March 2009, in the cramped back room of a local church, with a youth pastor named Chris Coakley and 19 students who decided the hunger they kept hearing about was theirs to do something about.
Every March became “Grain of Hope month.” The students raised money for families in Burkina Faso—for a well, for grain, for a donkey to carry a load to market, for the simple farming tools a family needed to feed itself. On Grain of Hope weekends, they went door to door in their own neighborhoods, collecting canned goods for the local food bank.
The lesson took root early: small, faithful acts, repeated and pooled together, add up to something none of those kids could have done alone.
That little youth group outgrew its back room. By 2012, we had become an official 501(c)(3), so we could steward what people were giving with full transparency. The scale of our work grew. The soul of it didn’t.
And that exact same conviction is why our work looks the way it does today, more than 5,000 miles away in West Africa.
What a “Little Bit” Looks Like in Burkina Faso
Travel to the region around Bobo-Dioulasso and you’ll meet families with enormous heart and very little margin—most of them living off small farms, up against recurring drought and rising prices.
Take in all of it at once and it’s overwhelming. So we don’t. We look at the next concrete thing we can put in someone’s hands.
That’s why we’ve come alongside our longtime partner on the ground, Robert Sanou—a respected leader in West African agricultural development. Through his own organization, Robert built and runs a vocational training center near Bobo-Dioulasso, and we’ve had the privilege of helping support that work. We don’t believe in handouts that vanish the moment the visitors fly home. We believe in coming alongside trusted local leaders who are teaching real skills and then putting the tools to use them into people’s hands.
At Robert’s center, young people learn trades the local economy actually needs: agriculture, animal husbandry, and electrical work. Adults take short, intensive courses in soap making, fabric dyeing, and gardening.
But the real difference shows up on graduation day.
Students don’t just walk away with a certificate. They walk away with a shovel. A wheelbarrow. A mixing basin for soap production. The starter materials to begin earning the very next day.
A plastic basin might look like nothing to someone passing by. But to a mother who has just spent a month learning to make soap, it’s everything—the one tool that turns a new skill into a business and a steadier future for her children. That’s a “little bit” doing exactly what it was made to do.
The Next Piece of the Puzzle
This is also why we care so much about what comes next: the Bama Farm.
The vision for Bama Farm is a working, organic farm that raises cattle, poultry, and crops—sized not only to put affordable food within reach of a city of 800,000, but to generate enough local income to fund ministry and development across the region on its own. The long game has always been the same: a community that no longer leans on donations from overseas, because it has built its own engine.
Getting there will take work, and it will take partners willing to bring their piece to the table.
We’ve never needed a single hero to write one enormous check. We need a community willing to bring their individual pieces—funding a student’s training, helping support the work in the classrooms, praying for it, investing in Burkina Faso. Whatever your piece is, it matters.
You don’t have to fix the whole world today. You just have to bring your little bit.
We’ll keep doing what those 19 kids did in a back room in 2009—putting the little bits together, and trusting God to make them into something far bigger than the sum.