give with wisdom that they may receive with dignity
The late-Apostle Marvin J. Ashton spoke in a conference address entitled Give with Wisdom That They May Receive with Dignity (November 1981) of a stake Relief Society President that had flashed a large picture on a screen, during a department session of Education Week sponsored by BYU, showing a bright-eyed boy with unkempt hair and folded arms, deep in thought. The caption read, "I know I'm somebody 'cause God don't make no junk." Ashton thought that, 'with the grammar improved, that caption could well be the theme of Church welfare services'.
Marvin J. Ashton believed that, 'every human being in every walk of life needs help in building his self-respect and self-reliance. To be truly effective, [church] welfare services must be concerned with the betterment of the total individual. A person’s image of himself is nothing more or less than what he has learned through his experiences and his interactions with others'. I will come back to this statement in a later article.
human dignity
I currently work with a faith-based aid organization, where the concept of human dignity lies at the center of the organization's philosophy and ethos. This concept is three-fold, and therefore lends itself well to mormonism. Although the importance of individual self-reliance and the importance of the family being the first instance of help in a crisis, church welfare services are built on the idea of human dignity: give help to self-help. I will describe below the three ideas that make up the human dignity triangle, as understood by the above-mentioned organization, and see how they fit with mormon ideas. If we were to organize these three ideas into a triangle, the model would look like this:
Human security implies food security, personal security, peaceful coexistence, access to health, water, clothes and shelter.
Human development implies access to education, vocational training, skills acquisition, as well as improving how societies work with the poor, the marginali
