The Sacred Dignity in Financial Foundations For Spiritual Growth

Maria lives in Colombia. For years, she painstakingly cared for unschooled children on an irregular income while tending to a makeshift home. 

Then, an organization called Opportunity International (OI) entered her life — and the effect has been lifechanging in the most literal sense, complete with intergenerational ripples. After 14 months of training, support and access to OI’s financial tools, Maria is now running a soup kitchen. She bought a house of her own, and her children are consistently at school. 

The organization’s impact on Maria and her family’s life has been transformative, and while it started with eliminating financial hurdles, it ultimately went much deeper. Through OI’s support, Maria has found fresh hope that previously seemed impossible, rooted in a new sense of spiritual health through dignity. 

“It is our faith which propels us to do the work we do,” declared Atul Tandon, CEO of Opportunity International. “Irrespective of where our clients are, it is our faith, it is my relationship with my God, who calls me to love others, which propels me to do what we do and do it well, so I can honor God and his creation in the process.” 

The (Neglected) Financial Side of Spiritual Solutions

“From time immemorial, the only real way people have supported each other is by holding hands and helping each other,” Tandon said. The reference has never felt more poignant than a quarter into the 21st century. The communal element of support is often missing in a digital age where someone can donate through an email link or a text in the middle of a football game. 

Yet, it is integral to Opportunity International’s entire take on philanthropy, one that blends nuanced health and well-being with calculated financial aid. For Tandon, these are not mutually exclusive areas of charitable work. All three are required for real, sustained spiritual growth and health.

As is the case with Mary and the thousands of others that OI has impacted, true, transformative, life-giving change comes from deeply spiritual work that seeks to see the sacred dignity of each other while simultaneously tending to our equally sacred duty to look out for one another. This requires a comprehensive strategy that includes helping individuals rebuild their finances, care for themselves, and spark fresh hope in something bigger than either.

When asked about the core problem that Opportunity International addresses, Tandon cut straight to the point: poverty is the principal problem behind so many things we face in the world. “Everything else flows from that,” he explained. “Poor nutrition, poor health, poor maternal health — it all flows from that.” Addressing extreme poverty at its root causes is the most definite way to reduce mortality and increase well-being and quality of life. Tandon and his team are seeking to address a bigger, systemic issue at the heart of global poverty.

Finding Ways to Distribute Existing Solutions

Poverty is typically defined as a lack of economic resources. In that sense, the solution is simple. Good income eliminates poverty and leads to economic success. It’s basic math.

Why, then, do so many good, hard-working people still live below the poverty line? There are millions of others besides Mary from Colombia. In fact, we’re talking about a serious percentage of humanity. 

Tandon points out that according to the International Labor Organization (ILO), over 90% of people in areas like Sub-Saharan Africa don’t get a paycheck. Similar struggles with sporadic wages are common across the Indian subcontinent as well as areas like Colombia and Haiti.

The key to addressing this issue is recognizing that we don’t need new solutions. Nor do we need more material possessions. It’s about distribution. 

“The future is already here, except that it is unevenly divided,” Tandon said. Perspective is important. A hundred years ago, there wasn’t as much to go around, and people correspondingly thought the global population capacity was fairly low. In the 21st century, we know how to produce enough for everyone to have what they need. That means, in most cases, the solutions to ending extreme hunger and extreme poverty — things like advanced farming equipment and technological tools — already exist. 

The sticking point, at least initially,  is getting those solutions into the hands of the people who need them the most. In Tandon’s words, “The question is of the will and the means.”

The Heart of the Issue of Global Poverty

Efficient distribution is the core complication at the heart of global poverty. As easy as it is to skip over the practical nature of economic needs, this is a key stepping stone in the journey toward genuine, sustainable spiritual transformation.

There are countless institutions, like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and many sovereign governments, that have stepped up to create secular solutions. The challenge is connecting those practical strategies with holistic initiatives that go beyond the immediate needs to feed long-term shared flourishing. 

This is the revelation that rarely lands with a donor casually scrolling on their phone or skimming an email on their couch. Distributing solutions — even effectively — only addresses financial poverty. True philanthropy, genuine community support, and real helping hands must reach further. They must speak not just to what people lack, but to what they long for: sacred dignity and divine belonging. 

This is why a specific quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. is clearly positioned right in Opportunity International’s 2024 Impact Report. It reads: “We are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will only be an initial act. One day, the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway.”

This “transformed highway” mentality is where we strike gold. It’s where we transition from distant donors helping statistic-driven beneficiaries to humans helping humans. This is where we also begin to see the more profound problems hiding behind surface-level poverty. 

When you pull back the curtain, it becomes clear that financial destitution comes with broken lives. It is the visible portion of a wound that runs much deeper and requires a more complex solution based on the empathetic ability of each human to see the sacred in the other. 

This bigger-picture mentality turns each financial philanthropic interaction into an opportunity to build a person’s economic capacity. Furthermore, that process becomes an essential first step in a holistic, spiritually-centered solution — one that catalyzes a personal, familial, and communal revolution.

Holistic Help With Financial Foundations

For Opportunity International, addressing economic poverty is an essential part of building awareness and self-worth. If you skip that foundational economic element, everything falls apart. “It’s almost like the skeleton of the body’s not there,” Tandon said. “You can keep building up the muscles and the nerves, but they can’t stand.”

This approach centering dignity and genuine care for each other helps clarify the need for economic support, not as an end in itself but as part of a holistic, sacred-centered solution. It removes more superficial concerns that often cloak the real spiritual brokenness underneath the surface.

What does that kind of philanthropy look like in practice? 

Tandon divides the solutions for this hard and holy work between a supply side (donors) and a demand side (beneficiaries). As far as demand is concerned, Opportunity International has found that the greatest impact comes from things like:

• Helping individuals build skills needed to earn their own way.
• Social protection, including trusted advisory support from their communities. (World Bank reported in 2025 that three in four people in the poorest countries lack this rudimentary form of economic support.)
• Facilitating connections with local banks to provide access to financial resources.

“When you put those three things together, that’s when magic happens,” he said. At the same time, he added that this isn’t always easy. For the supply side, it isn’t a give that a for-profit business will want to work with the underprivileged. In response, Opportunity has worked as an intermediary to bridge that gap. Their team has set up lifelines for things like insurance and financial transfers. This is deliberately done through local businesses and groups, encouraging everyone involved to create market systems that can support individuals as they establish themselves.

The initial goal is to create more jobs and more income, and Opportunity has been extremely effective in that capacity. In 2024 alone, the organization partnered with over 146 financial institutions and countless humanitarians. In doing so, it reached over 21 million people with the tools to break free from extreme poverty. 

Tandon added that the efficiency of Opportunity’s work is a major factor, as well. Due to the group’s work with local organizations (rather than creating every service itself), every dollar invested in the nonprofit releases between $10 and $15 in local capital on the ground.

Yet, despite the success, this remains a preliminary step to the most important part of their work.

The Good Samaritan Motivation

Tandon and his team follow up their economic initiatives with their “Pathways to Well-being” program. Their internal name for this educational multi-module track to sustainable personal development is shalom — a word that translates as peace, wellbeing, and a joyful existence in life. 

Individuals in extreme poverty have often lost a sense of hope, expectation, and trust in their community. The program addresses poverty at a fundamental level through the restoration of relationships and a belief in one’s abilities. 

“We believe,” Tandon said, “that for anybody to have a joyful existence and thriving life, we have to be in right relationship with ourselves, with our family, with our friends in our community around us, and of course, in our case, with God himself.”

The shalom of the Pathways to Well-being process goes beyond the dollars and cents. Along with financial health, the story-driven curriculum dives into personal, familial, community, and environmental well-being. “That is what shalom speaks to and what our faith drives us to do,” Tandon said, “It is a holistic solution.”

This sense of hope is more than noticeable, too. According to one example from internal data, after taking the course, nearly 2,000 clients (82% of whom were female) saw significant increases in well-being, including:

• Practicing hope and improving well-being (increased from 36% to 76%)
• Setting and working toward goals (increased from 38% to 64%)
• Making household decisions independently (increased from 36% to 52%)
• Preparing for financially difficult times (increased from 40% to 52%)

Each of these numbers represents thousands of changed lives. He added that this is more than a passion, it is a responsibility we have toward one another. “We believe very, very deeply that we are all created in God’s image, and at the same time, God has given appropriate and adequate resources in all of creation for us to look after each other,” Tandon said. “It’s our job then to look after each other, which is what we do. We create the means for people of God’s will and good will to act on their faith or act on their motivations to say I want to stand with somebody who doesn’t have much.”

The combination of God’s will and good will is one worth dwelling on. How much further would our financial support go if it were centered on conscious efforts of interdependence, shared humanity, and spiritual vision?

By Jaron Pak