Eugene Cho – One Day’s Wages
What you earn in one day may be a relatively insignificant percentage of your income, but that amount can make great strides in the life of an impoverished person in another country or in our own. It is with this principle that Eugene Cho and his wife, Minhee, started the international grassroots movement One Day’s Wages, an organization dedicated to ending acute poverty world-wide.
Cho was ready to drop some F-bombs as he talked about the disparity that exists in our world. Incredible advances in media are all around us, yet here we are in 2010 and more than 660 million people without sanitation live on less than $2/day. We are probably the most overrated generation, Cho says. We are in love with our ideas so much that we don’t seem to move beyond them. #FAIL. We know all about the statistics, as hard as they are to comprehend. Yet, we don’t feel connected. What does it take for us to feel compassion towards our neighbors locally and globally? Do we love our ideas only until a cost is involved? Until a sacrifice is asked? This is our challenge, Cho says, as we live in affluence.
So how do we move beyond this? Eugene and his family, along with One Day’s Wages, invite others to hear the stories and meet the people behind these numbers of extreme global poverty. The challenge? Donate 0.4% of your annual salary. One day’s wages. It’s really not as much as you think. It’s a small start on a longer journey.
Each time I hear Eugene speak, he reminds us of our tendency to want to leave it to the Brad Pitts and the rich somebody’s of the world to do the work to end global poverty. We are reminded that everyone matters. That we can inspire one day at a time; one instance at a time.
One Day’s Wages is not a movement of rockstars and millionaires, but of ordinary people who can make change starting with just one person.
–Sophia Agtarap | @sophiakristina
[...] Day’s Wages’ founder and lead pastor of Quest Church Eugene Cho gave a entertaining, informative lecture about global poverty and made it relevant. How is it that [...]