Food For The Poor Strategic Plan, Sharpen 2025-2027
Plan 2025 – 2027
“As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.”
(Proverbs 27:17, NIV)
S Spiritual development
H A R P E N
Human capital
Accountability and stewardship
Review and evaluation
Partnership development
Excellencedriven
New ideas and innovation
Who We Are and What We Stand For
Our Story
Food For The Poor (FFTP) began as a response to a calling to help vulnerable people. As a Christian organization, our work has always been rooted in faith, compassion, and a strong desire to serve. Over the years, we’ve grown into one of the largest faithbased relief and development organizations, yet we’ve never lost sight of our mission to serve those in need with dignity and love.
Our
Purpose
We envision a world where every child is nourished, every family is safe, and every community has the tools to sustain themselves and their communities. Our purpose is to walk alongside people facing poverty, not just to provide aid, but to help them discover new paths toward dignity, purpose, and lasting positive change. Food For The Poor is facilitating paths out of poverty and transforming lives. We also indirectly serve those with the means to help, donors and volunteers, with experiences to promote spiritual growth.
CRUSE Guiding Principles
Our work reflects the love of Christ and the depth of His compassion. CRUSE (Collaboration, Right Things Right, Urgency, Stewardship, Engagement) shapes everything we do. It helps us remain rooted in our Christian identity while empowering people materially and spiritually.
Collaboration improves the way we work together as an organization to tackle challenges and provide solutions in an efficient and sustainable manner.
Doing the right thing the right way – every time – maximizes our effectiveness and contributes to a strong ethical foundation that engenders trust and integrity.
Our goal to make a difference in more lives more quickly gives a sense of urgency to our work.
We responsibly plan and manage donor resources, ensuring every contribution is utilized efficiently and effectively. This involves transparent accountability and oversight.
The more we engage and inspire our donors and our staff, the more meaningfully we can touch the lives of those we serve.
Our Guiding Verse
“Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of Mine, you did for Me.” (Matthew 25:40)
This verse shapes how we see people in need. Christ is present in those we serve.
Heart of Our Work
We believe that faith isn’t just part of our work, it’s the heart of it. That’s why we don’t stop at relieving poverty’s symptoms; our faith calls us to care for the root causes that can erode human dignity.
The Challenge Before Us
The fundamental issue we aim to address is entrenched poverty across Latin America and the Caribbean that threatens livelihoods, erodes human dignity, and stifles spirits. We are committed to changing that.
Our Programmatic Direction
We’re sharpening how we design programs, starting with communities, listening first, and building long-term solutions.
Our Strategic Approach
Our Goal:
FACILITATE PATHS OUT OF POVERTY AND TRANSFORM LIVES.
Better Before Bigger
Before we grow, we commit to improving and introducing new ways of working.
This means:
• Adopting proven strategies
• Building deeper technical knowledge
• Pursuing operational excellence
• Learning and adapting constantly
Driven by Partnerships
Partnerships are central to our SHARPEN strategy. By working with local churches, leaders, and grassroots groups, we build programs that reflect each community’s needs and strengths.
Why Local Partnerships Matter
Culturally Relevant: Programs are co-created with communities to reflect local values and lived experience.
Responsive: In times of crisis, trusted local networks mobilize quickly from within.
Empowering: Partners and communities lead together, building ownership and lasting pride.
Local partnerships allow for:
• Deep relationships with the communities they serve.
Everything we do aims to help individuals and families move beyond poverty and build lives full of purpose, stability, and fulfillment.
• Together, these partnerships strengthen our impact and lay the groundwork for lasting change.
Community Ownership
Lasting change only happens when communities lead.
That’s why Food For The Poor:
• Involves people from the start
• Offers tools and training
• Focuses on agency, not dependency
MEAL and Our 4D Framework
We’ve integrated MEAL: Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability, and Learning into every program, guided by our 4D framework:
• Discover: Learn what’s really needed
• Design: Create thoughtful, relevant solutions
• Deploy: Implement with excellence and care
• Destiny: Ensure long-term success through follow-up
Integrating Aid and Development
• Resource optimization. Building on existing infrastructure/capacity is a better way to leverage resources.
We respond to immediate needs but never stop at relief. Our goal is to develop resilient communities that are less vulnerable and more self-sufficient.
The Frameworks That Guide Us
We Don’t Follow a Script, We Follow the Spirit
Every community is different. We listen first, stay flexible, and build programs based on data, local wisdom, and shared values.
Our Theory of Change (ToC)
Our ToC is based on the idea that meaningful transformation happens when people work together, those who receive help and those who give it.
Those We Serve Directly: Individuals and families facing poverty who seek a better future.
Those Who Serve with Us: Donors, volunteers, and partners who share their time, resources, and hearts.
Shared Purpose
At the center of our work is a shared purpose: to transform both giver and receiver, community participant and donor – everyone involved in Food For The Poor’s work. Together, this shared purpose creates relationships built on dignity, compassion, and mutual transformation.
Why It Matters
We believe change isn’t one-sided. When someone receives help, it opens the door to hope, strength,
At Food For The Poor, This Means:
Caring for the whole person: body, mind, and spirit
Staying committed: long-term involvement that builds trust and impact
and opportunity. And when someone gives, they experience joy, connection, and personal growth. Everyone is uplifted. Everyone is changed. That’s the heart of our mission: real relationships that bring real transformation for all involved.
Integral Community Transformation
Poverty is complex, and so is our response. Integral community transformation is our holistic approach that addresses the many connected parts of a person’s life – social, economic, environmental, spiritual, and cultural. It’s about improving overall well-being, not just meeting immediate needs.
Working across sectors: combining health, education, and livelihoods, and recognizing their interconnectedness
Empowering communities: using the ABCD approach (AssetBased Community Development) to help people use their own strengths to shape their future
We believe the people we serve are not defined by what they lack, but by what they already have as being made in the image of God. Our role is to walk with them, helping those gifts grow.
Food For The Poor as a Platform for Impact
Partnership-Driven Model
Food For The Poor multiplies good. We harness the strengths of people and organizations, turning collective effort into impact far greater than the sum alone. We bring together donors, supporters, communities, solution providers, specialists, local partner organizations, and churches all aligned toward the common mission of facilitating paths out of poverty and transforming lives.
A Regional Strategy
We responsibly plan and manage donor resources, ensuring every contribution is utilized efficiently and effectively. This involves transparent accountability and oversight. We’re concentrated on countries with deep need and high potential: Haiti, Jamaica, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Colombia.
This lets us:
• Deepen our presence
• Focus resources where they matter most
• Build stronger, long-term partnerships
Expansion With Purpose
We’re growing into Mexico, Ecuador, and Peru. We go where we can make the biggest difference.
MEXICO ECUADOR PERU EXPANSION
COLOMBIA
HAITI
HONDURAS GUATEMALA EL SALVADOR JAMAICA
Our 10 Focus Areas
Water, Sanitation, & Hygiene (WASH)
Hunger Relief & Nutrition
Agriculture & Food Security
Community Development
Education
Food For The Poor categorizes its work using 10 focus areas.
Economic Empowerment
Health
Outreach to Vulnerable Groups
Emergency Preparedness & Response
These areas work together to create sustainable, integrated change.
Cross-Cutting Themes: ACROSS
Food For The Poor’s work is guided by seven cross-cutting themes represented by the acronym ACROSS:
AC R O S
SAbstract Aspects of Poverty
Poverty impacts more than material well-being, affecting spiritual, emotional, and social dimensions.
Care for Creation
Environmental stewardship is an essential part of our programs, ensuring that our work contributes to sustainable development.
Review
Ongoing evaluation and data-driven assessment to ensure continuous improvement and adaptation of our programs.
Obligation to Do No Harm
We are committed to ethical practices that avoid causing dependency or harm to the communities we serve.
Social Inclusivity
We strive to include marginalized groups in all of our programs, promoting equity and justice.
Share It Forward
Promoting knowledge and resource-sharing to help communities and individuals replicate and expand positive impacts.
The Cross
Our faith informs every aspect of our work, ensuring that Christian principles are woven into our programs.
SHARPEN’s Five Strategic Goals
• Aim to see Christ in those we serve
• Promote dignity, self-worth, and mindset change
• Embed Christian values in all we do
• Adopt Lean principles
• Improve systems and data use
• Develop staff and leadership
• Involve communities in design and delivery
• Focus on holistic, long-term solutions
• Use feedback and data to improve
• Focus on audience-first communication
• Use data to understand donors
• Engage diverse and new donor groups
• Maintain transparency with donors and partners
• Use resources wisely and ethically
• Heighten accountability
Execution Plan
To carry out our strategic plan, we’ve adopted the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) framework to cascade goals across the organization – aligning teams and individuals to ensure everyone has a role in execution.
Looking Ahead: Our Vision Beyond 2027
We’re in this for the long haul. We don’t just want to relieve poverty; we want to help communities break free from it for good.
Poverty isn’t only defined by income. It’s also about broken relationships, distorted identity, and missing purpose. Food For The Poor wants to change that.
We walk with individuals and communities as they:
• Rediscover their identity
• Restore broken relationships
• Unlock their God-given potential
By 2027, we aim to:
• Sharpen our approach to serving people and communities in deep, lasting ways.
• Build capacity for sustained growth rooted in operational excellence and stewardship.
“Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of Mine, you did for Me.” (Matthew 25:40, NIV) foodforthepoor.org
