 1. Relationships:These Numbers Have Faces believes that relationships can change the world. We care deeply about issues of poverty, disease, and conflict, but the driving force behind TNHF is the connection we have with our friends in South Africa. Numbers, statistics, figures, and data are important ways to evaluate and measure complex issues like global poverty. But in terms of actually reducing it, we believe transforming statistics into human relationships to be one of the most effective and powerful steps forward. It is in these relationships where hope comes alive, where God is real, and where our lives find significance greater than ourselves. No matter what the news media tell us, our dear friends in South Africa are not numbers. They are not color coded charts, pie graphs, or economic statistics. These Numbers Have Faces.  2. Responsibility:
“The fierce urgency of now.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. used those words in a stunning speech at New York’s Riverside Church in 1967.
When we started These Numbers Have Faces in 2007, we were motivated by a similar urgency. We knew that if we didn’t act, nobody else would. There is a lot of great work being done in South Africa, but it seemed that very few efforts were being made to empower young people through education and community reinvestment. Governments were focused on the crumbling economy, large NGO’s on South Africa’s HIV/AIDS epidemic, who would step in to provide opportunities and hope for a handful of young people in the townships?
We had a responsibility then and the urgency continues to this day.  3. Reconciliation:In South Africa, there is a term, "Ubuntu," which refers to our common humanity as being beautifully bound up together. It is a shortened version of a Zulu maxim, “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu” ("a person is a person through other persons")
This value system is now generally seen as the backbone of the new South Africa, a unifying belief in a society divided and ravaged by apartheid.
Ubuntu is a belief system that exists in few places outside of developing countries, as most in the West see themselves as individuals rather than as a highly interconnected community. However, it was Dr. Martin Luther King who tried to implement an Ubuntu-like ideology when he said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
It is the spirit of Ubuntu that drives These Numbers Have Faces. Please join us and share in the opportunity to act upon a belief system in which we are all tied together, all matter to one another, and are all desperately loved by a God who is at work unifying his people regardless of nationality, skin color, or social class.
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