"We Need You": Ismael Hernandez and the Recovery of Charity
Every act of charity is a gift, but is it a thing or a recognition? A transfer of goods or an encounter between persons? The Greek philanthropia, the Latin caritas, and the Hebrew tzedakah each carry within themselves an old intuition: that to give is, in some sense, to acknowledge.
Modern charity, organized at scale and routed through institutions, often loses that intuition. The poor become the recipients of programs rather than the subjects of relationships. The giver, freed from the friction of encounter, can dispense generosity without ever beholding the person to whom it is given. Something is delivered. Something else is withheld.
This week on Acton Line, I sit down with Ismael Hernandez, founder and president of the Freedom & Virtue Institute and author of Not Tragically Colored: Freedom, Personhood, and the Renewal of Black America and Rethinking Charity: Restoring Dignity to Poverty Relief, to talk about what we forget when we forget the person at the heart of charity.
The Anthropological First Question
Hernandez’s argument begins where every serious account of charity must begin: with the human person. Before we ask how to help, he insists, we must ask whom we are helping. The poor are not an undifferentiated mass, nor are they a problem to be managed by appropriately credentialed administrators. They are persons bearing the imago Dei. Each had a name, a history, a vocation, and capacities yet to be discovered.
If poverty is not a disease to be cured by top-down planning but a condition experienced by persons whose dignity precedes their need, then the entire architecture of much contemporary charity, designed to deliver goods to passive recipients, is misconfigured. It addresses the symptom and ignores the soul. When we view those in need as victims or as mere objects of our good intentions, we strip them of agency in the very act of meaning to help them.
From Transaction to Encounter
The reorientation Hernandez proposes is not a matter of redesigning programs but of reimagining the moment of contact. The transactional question “How may I help you?” assumes a fixed asymmetry between helper and helped. It can be asked, and answered, without either party really seeing the other.
The question Hernandez prefers is different. “We are so glad you’re here. We need you.” It is a small reformulation that changes everything. It treats the person in need not as a recipient but as a participant. A person whose presence is wanted, whose contribution is sought, whose agency is presumed.
This is the spirit animating the Freedom & Virtue Institute’s Effective Compassion Training and Self-Reliance Clubs. It is patient relational work, unglamorous and uncountable by the metrics that please donors of a more managerial cast, but it is the work that actually restores the things poverty corrodes: confidence, capacity, connection.
Respect Before Pity
Hernandez’s own story gives the argument its edge. A former Marxist-Leninist from Puerto Rico, he came into Christian ministry in the inner cities of southwest Florida and discovered how often “compassion” hollowed itself out into condescension. Generosity unaccompanied by recognition is not virtue but its counterfeit. It flatters the giver and diminishes the receiver. It mistakes the relief of guilt for the love of neighbor.
“Stop feeling sorry for the poor,” Hernandez puts it bluntly. “What about respecting the poor a little bit?”
That inversion, respect before pity, reorders the moral universe of charitable work. It refuses the comfortable hierarchy of benefactor and beneficiary and demands the harder, more humanizing labor of treating the person across from you as someone whose dignity is not yours to bestow.
It is a conviction with deep roots in the Christian tradition, and one that resonates with Pope Leo XIV’s recent call in Dilexi Te to bring the poor “from the margins to the center” of our economic, social, and spiritual life. Almsgiving without recognition leaves the margins exactly where they are.
Watch the full conversation with Ismael Hernandez here: