YWAM Kausar is uniquely placed to function in both International and Local capacities. Youth With a Mission is a movement of like minded groups operating across the globe, united by common beliefs and values. This enables a team with an international reach to serve a local specialist team whenever needed. A local group is never overuled by a central office as there are no headquarters anywhere. Every component, whether an international communications body or a local ministry, develops their own working relationships and have local accountability structures built in. This allows for global reach to embrace the flexibility and specific nature of local activities sensitive to a specific location.
Unity across Diversity
No one team is allowed to jeopardise the work of another. This unity gives an operational strength that serves beneficiaries with both resources and expertise. It may not have the huge resources of centrally organised global organisation, but it is adaptable, responsive and able to serve others with the dignity and respect that is already embraced between its own components.
A Case Study
YWAM Kausar has grown to appreciate this strength through dealing with agencies that lack this combination of sensitivity and capacity. An example is our experience when approaching a large relief and development agency for funds to deliver relief to a large village in Pakistan. The location had been destroyed by an attack by multiple mobs determined to destroy the entire community. It was summer, in an area with the highest temperatures in the nation. Many elderly people were forced out of their homes into the sun as they lay on hastily rescued beds, removed from the debris of what was once a home. Our Rapid Response Team was one the first on ground, assessing the immediate needs of the victims of this horrendous attack. They drew up plans for tailored Relief Packs for each homeless family. The packs included provision of simple fans to prevent deaths of the elderly from heat stroke. When presenting our proposal in person to the UK agency, we were told point blank that no relief package could include fans. Such items were not formally classified by the agency as ‘relief items’. They had no administrative capacity to change this or to respond to this immediate, life saving need on the ground. Furthermore, they told us that even we if found funding for fans from another source, they could not support a relief effort that ultimately included fans.
Strength in Unity
This kind of experience was shocking and disappointing to us, but heightened our understanding of the genius and power of unity. Mutual respect and common values have a strength that cannot be found in responses subject to the control of committee led, top down agencies informed by impersonal ‘experts’ unfamiliar with immediate local circumstances and unable to advise on how to respond appropriately to immediate needs.
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