It was January 2024, and I found myself on another Burundi adventure where I met up with John McCready, grandson of the first Free Methodist missionaries to Burundi, John Wesley and Jennie Esther Haley. Ninety years ago, the Haleys set out to establish an Indigenous church that would be self-sustaining, self-governing and self-supporting. Their model has resulted in the Free Methodist work growing to a membership of more than 300,000.

While the church is self-sustaining, initiatives such as Hope Africa University (HAU) require funding for continued growth. To foster growth, John McCready is shifting from a Canada-based career in community development to extensive work as director of the Haley McCready Outreach and Development Fund (HMODF). His passion is to link agricultural students at HAU with communities ready to adopt sustainable farming practices. In the past 12 years, John has established 39 such projects designed to lift people from poverty to a sustainable way of life.

The learning curve for me as I traveled up country to visit an HMODF project was to capture the community mindset. There is individualism – “I need to eat.” Yet once the basic needs are met, people live for the good of the community. If they ever experience a windfall of blessing, peer pressure results in their sharing with the community until they personally are back at “square one” financially.

John’s aim with agricultural development projects is to lift the base level of “square one” by group ownership and governance of capital so that when a “windfall” is achieved, it is jointly owned, jointly beneficial and reinvested for the good of the whole.

Beneficiaries of these projects say, “We used to beg. Now our children eat every day because we have our own food, and we can buy soap and clothes.” This is the immediate reward for success, but the only way to preserve an adequate portion of a windfall for sustained investment is by having it belong to the whole group. Experience has demonstrated the key lies in shared ownership with groups of 12 women managing self-governing associations.

These associations are administered by volunteer community workers selected from Hope Africa University graduates. John strives to connect graduates from the new agriculture program at HAU with an established association where they can gain real-world practical knowledge and experience.

Pray for Hope Africa University, and pray the agricultural development model can be replicated over and over to transform the lives of Burundi’s 12 million people.

Learn more about Hope Africa University at hopeafricauniversity.org or the Haley McCready Outreach and Development at haleymccreadyfund.com.