- Greetings radicals. On today's show, I'd like to tell you about a very worthy charitable relief effort that I myself have had the privilege of being involved in for almost five years now, and ask you to consider making a financial donation to this work. I'll describe all the details as we get into the audio here, but put simply, I've been involved for, again, almost five years with a variety of relief efforts in the South American nation of Venezuela.

And that has taken a number of different shapes over the years, again, as I'll tell you about in a few minutes. Currently, the most productive and effective effort that I've been involved in has been to provide food relief and agricultural relief by helping with gardening supplies to plant large gardens in various Venezuelan penitentiaries, where there are many men, primarily men, men and women imprisoned in these Venezuelan penitentiaries.

And the opportunity and the need has now exceeded what I myself can give out of my own personal financial resources. So I'm bringing the request to you and asking you to contribute. Links are in the description where you can go directly and make a credit card donation or use PayPal, whichever is easier for you.

That money will get directly to me. And as I'll describe in the audio coming up here, I'll describe what I'm gonna do with the money and all those details. But if at any point in time you're ready to give, please just go to that link and make a donation.

Let me begin with a little bit of backstory and I'll continue on from there to share with you a little bit about the current work. Longtime listeners to Radical Personal Finance know that I've had the opportunity to be involved in a variety of different ways with some very important and effective relief efforts serving Venezuelan refugees.

I've had a great interest in Venezuela. Ever since 2005, when I was in college in 2005, in a study abroad program in Costa Rica, I had a professor who extolled the virtues of Venezuela at that time as basically being the ideal expression of what a modern economy should be.

This professor was an extremely left-wing professor and I was being confronted with the philosophical claims in favor of leftism. And at that time, Cuba and Venezuela were being held before me as the paragons of modern development, how all nation states should function. And of the two, although all of the woes of Cuba were being blamed on the US blockade of Cuba, many of the benefits of Cuba were being extolled again and again, and Venezuela was being held out as the ideal example of how a country can flourish under a leftist system of government if not being blockaded by another nation.

Venezuela at that time was the wealthiest country in South America, very high standard of living, all kinds of stuff, stuff that I could hardly believe at the time. Well, fast forward after I returned to the United States, I started to hear a few years later about a massive economic crisis and being one who paid a lot of attention to economic crises.

When I heard one year that there was a million percent hyperinflation in Venezuela, I could hardly believe it. And I started to follow it more closely, and Venezuela went through a terrible economic crisis with just terrible hyperinflation. And going back about five years now, I started to be involved with some people who were taking part in various refugee relief efforts.

All across Venezuela, people were starving, and there were thousands and thousands and thousands of refugees leaving Venezuela, people just literally leaving with their children on their backs and walking out of the country to try to go and find any life anywhere else that they could put together where they could find food.

And at the time, again, I talked about this in past episodes, but at the time, it started with where I first became aware of it was the refugee relief efforts. And the situation for Venezuelan refugees was absolutely horrendous. There was incredible poverty, incredible sickness, and there were huge, huge flows of refugees coming out of Venezuela at that time.

Again, people fleeing absolute starvation. I was able to be connected with a relief effort that where, I have to be careful with some of the details here, a relief effort where a huge quantities of food were shipped in from abroad, and a lot of that food we were able to get into Venezuela.

But most of the work was involved with refugee relief. And at the time here in Radical Personal Finance, we raised a significant sum of money to provide for refugee relief. And that sum of money was used to purchase food, was used to purchase a vehicle for some people who were involved at the border, and providing specific relief to many, many Venezuelan refugees that were at that time coming out of the country.

Now, the refugee flows have gone back and forth over the years. Sometimes they've been higher, sometimes they've been lower, and there have been a variety of ongoing efforts and needs of refugees. What has happened though, is that almost anyone who was able to get out of Venezuela, got out of Venezuela.

And as the countries around Venezuela, there in South America, basically reached their capacity for refugees, many of the refugees headed north. There was a huge flow about a year or so ago of refugees heading for the border of the United States. Many of them have gone to the United States, tried to get into the United States under the very lax immigration policies that the United States has had in place for the last couple of years.

And it's been a nightmare for so many people in that situation. Point remains just that the refugee thing was a separate work that I've continued to be involved with over the last years, but the initial fundraising that I did here on Radical Personal Finance was sufficient for the need and sufficient for the opportunity.

Now, what happened is through the contact that originally started with refugee relief, there were a variety of contacts made by some of the people that I'm involved with to start to work inside of Venezuelan prisons. Now, for my primarily North American audience, the way that prisons work in South America and in much of the world is very different than the way that prisons work in North America.

First of all, it's difficult to ascertain the actual guilt or innocence of prisoners. Many prisoners are locked in prison because they're guilty of terrible crimes. However, many prisoners are locked in prison because they are political prisoners and they are supporters of the wrong political party or the wrong political position, and so they get locked up.

I have heard many stories of people who have been locked up for years. There are no charges against them. There are no charges against them. There are no, there's no, their case is not being heard. They can't get a trial date, and they're just locked up in prison for a significant amount of time.

Now, it's a mixture. Don't let me, hear me clearly. I'm not trying to say that everyone who's locked up in a prison is innocent. That's absolutely not true. What I am saying is, first of all, if you have any hesitations about supporting prisoners, which I don't believe you should, we should all support prisoners and provide relief for them.

I'll save comments, further social commentary for another day, but a lot of times people are uncomfortable with, well, if someone's guilty of a crime, then he deserves to suffer. Well, it's a very mixed up situation. The other aspect of the prison system in South America that's very different than the prison system in North America is quite simply that prisoners are locked up, and yet they are entirely reliant on outside family and friends to support them.

And so there's not, for example, the government doesn't provide food in the prisons, at least not substantial amounts of it. You can't go to prison and think, well, at least the government's gonna give me three square meals a day and a bed to sleep in. No, on the contrary, you're gonna get locked up in prison, and if your friends and family members don't bring you food and don't bring you money to buy food, then you're going to starve.

And the levels of hunger and disease and all kinds of issues in many prisons throughout Latin America are absolutely staggering and heart-wrenching. It's really, really bad. And these people have basically no opportunity. Well, a number of years ago, there was a prison riot in Venezuela, and some people that I am in contact with had the opportunity to negotiate a peaceful settlement to the prison riot.

The prisoners had taken over the prison, all of the authorities were outside. Last time this happened, there was a massacre, and lots of people died. This time around, we were able to negotiate a peaceful settlement to it and avoid a massacre by the police and the soldiers outside of the prison of the prisoners who had taken over the prison.

And so this provided a foothold into some of the work that was available in Venezuelan prisons. Years ago, when President Hugo Chavez had come to power, he had expelled all Christian aid work and Christian missionaries out of the prison system because of his concerns about political work. And because of the work of successfully negotiating an end to the prison riot, there was a door that was opened up again for Christian missionaries and pastors to go back into the prisons and start to build churches and try to bring people together in Christian churches within the local prisons.

And so this led to a lot of different things. But along the way, one of the things that we started to work at was to use the grounds around the prison to plant gardens, large gardens, with the goal of helping the prisoners to grow food so that they could provide for themselves and make a little bit of money and have a productive, some amount of productive work to keep themselves occupied.

And so it's basically being run as a small business of sorts, like a micro business that each prisoner who desires is given a plot of land that is his to manage, is helped with the initial seeds and gardening supplies and instructions for how to grow things. And then he has complete and full supervision over that part of the land, and he's entitled to the produce that comes from that land.

Now, on the whole, this effort has been enormously successful, much more successful than ever dreamed of. It's not been perfect. One of the frustrating things is that in many cases, the guys are so hungry that they don't even let their crops grow. You'll have a little lettuce out there and tiny little pieces of lettuce, it's all being eaten before it grows, the tomatoes are eaten green.

But we've made progress and little by little, it's been very, very productive. But the good thing about it is this has taken basically vacant unused land and turned it productive. And more importantly, it has provided a great, again, a good source of calories and a great source of work and organization for many of the prisoners.

And so over the last years, this work has grown and grown and grown. And we've developed a team of pastors who have been involved with facilitating that. And these two things have gone hand in hand, of again, planting small churches and not small in some cases, but basically trying to facilitate prison fellowships inside of the prisons, as well as facilitating gardens and expanding the gardening program.

And the success of the program has given a lot of access and a lot of success. It has won many friends in high places and won quite a lot of respect of many people. And so that's been a really rewarding and productive use of time and energy to really try to solve some significant problems.

From a financial perspective, I'm pretty proud of the results. I don't claim any credit for them at all. I'm just proud of the results because I'm pretty skeptical of a lot of charitable work. Much of it seems to be an enormous waste of money. You get a huge budgets and whatnot for very few results.

So I'm skeptical of most charitable relief work. And thank God this work has been very productive and it's all been done on an absolute shoestring. The results from a financial perspective of what we could put into a fundraising video and whatnot for a big organization would be amazing. It's been really, really good.

I'm very, very pleased with the work. And it's been a really good return on investment. It hasn't needed a lot of capital though. And so I haven't, this is why I haven't been years since I've talked about any of these issues here publicly. I haven't done any fundraising for this.

I've been supporting it. There's been others that have supported it privately. And we've supported both the purchase of supplies for the physical relief work as well as the Christian ministers and their work as well. You get quite a lot of return on your money for the labor of very faithful, hardworking men who really care about the people that they're ministering to.

It's been really, really great. However, the opportunities have just gotten bigger and bigger. And so now we are trying to be faithful and expand to a larger level. So the opportunities for expansion though mean that now what we can do with the money or what we can do with if we had more money is worth doing.

And yet the opportunity has exceeded what I can do and what the other people who are directly involved can do. So I'm coming to you and I would like to invite you to be involved in it. Specifically, what I need is I need donations. And what I would do with those donations is I will use the donations to purchase agricultural supplies.

So what we do is purchase all of the supplies in Bogota, Colombia, where they're widely available, seeds, gardening supplies, tools, all of the things that are not available in Venezuela. And then we bring them in to Venezuela and we distribute them, make small package starter, starter packages that we hand out to the prisoners and teach them and give them classes on what to do.

And then they can go ahead and start running their own gardens and they get the crops. And again, they can make the money off of it, they can sell the produce, they can feed themselves, they can feed others, that's the plan. And so that's what I need your money for is your donations is to buy that.

I continue to be involved on the Christian side of things. I'm not scared to come to you and ask for you to donate to Christian work, but that's not my specific, just doesn't seem like that's something that I want to do at this point in time. Specifically, I'm not asking you to support missionaries.

This is a specific, a charitable relief effort, and I need money to purchase seeds and take it into Venezuela and deal with all of that. There are a few wrinkles to this as to why, first of all, you'll notice that I'm thinking carefully and choosing my words carefully. Due to all of the political instability, due to all of the details, due to all of the people who were involved, and due to the past history of relief and various laws that have been passed and laws that change and things like that, I'm trying to be very circumspect in my words so as not to unnecessarily involve someone who doesn't need to be unnecessarily involved.

Because of the sensitive political situation, it's better that a lot of this be relatively private. And the support that we've been able to receive from a government perspective is not something that anyone wishes to jeopardize because that support is very necessary to the well-being of the men who are imprisoned.

And so I wanna be thoughtful and respectful with my words and only share what's necessary to you. The problem is that that means that, basically, if you're gonna donate, you have to trust me. And I can't provide, and I'm not going to provide, any more due diligence or anything else than this.

You say, "Joshua, why don't you go "and actually start a large charity "or an official organization and things like that? "Why don't you go and do it?" Quite literally, it would be illegal for me to do it. When you send me money, I'm gonna take that money. I'm gonna get stacks of cash out of an ATM.

I'm gonna hand that money, the stacks of cash, to people who are going to go to the market in Bogota and buy large supplies, and then we're gonna ship them off to Venezuela. And so all of this work is all being done with basically no paper trail. Even if we wanted to provide a paper trail, we couldn't.

The whole concept, one of the things, I haven't done much on the stuff in Venezuela, but it's fascinating, with a lot of day-to-day businesses, the whole concept of accounting and bookkeeping, with the old currency that just, people going around with stacks and stacks and stacks of taped-up bolivares, bolivars, is just completely, the whole concept of bookkeeping and accounting disappeared from many places.

Not with big businesses, of course, who would keep their accounting in dollars and other stable currencies, but on a local level, it's like, the population has forgotten how to do bookkeeping and paper trails and receipts and all of that. So I can't, I actually can't, I can't do the necessary legal due diligences that would be involved of starting an organization.

And then there's so many, basically, the whole thing is operating on trust. I know the people that are involved, I trust them, I've been involved in sending money and being involved continually over time, and I will continue to be involved. I, myself, will be in Venezuela, touring at a separate event within a few weeks, and so I'll be delivering the work myself and be there physically myself in the coming weeks.

And so I'm not gonna use any of the money for anything except providing for them, but I can't provide any more, I can't provide any more paper trail or anything like that than you. So basically, I'm coming to you, I'm saying, if you trust me, if you respect me, then send me some money and I give you my word of honor that I will use it for the purposes that I'm describing.

And I'm hoping that in the future that we could expand and do more. The opportunity right now, this big expansion is a really exciting opportunity. There's no way, there's no way that I could organize, so I really wanna do more work here at Radical Personal Finance to connect us together.

There's zero possibility at the moment of doing anything in Venezuela because of visa restrictions and things like that. It's just, it's the security situation is very poor. It's a very unsafe place to travel without special protection and without special dispensation from the government authorities. And so I can't do it, I can't involve anybody at this point in time in Venezuela.

I have thought and looked and thought, okay, well, maybe we would do something in Colombia. Maybe we would, I could organize some kind of event and provide more publicity and public figure and invite the Radical Personal Finance family to do something in Colombia on the border. But I don't see any opportunity for that at this point in time.

So that's what it is. And so basically, I care a lot about charity and I don't know a lot about it. I find it easier to find problems with things that are done poorly than to actually suggest solutions of things that are being done well. And I don't wanna be the guy, I hate being the guy who comes out here and just pokes problem, problem, problem, problem at good, intelligent, good-hearted people who are trying to solve problems.

Just because things are inefficient, just because things are difficult doesn't mean that we should come out and find problems with them. They're trying. But I also think that we need to be really working hard on this because the world of charity and relief is so fraught with bloat and ineffectiveness and difficulty and things like that.

And so I'm just trying to prove out for myself are there some ideas and principles that could be gained from this? And maybe at some point in the future I can share some of those things. But at the moment, this particular work has been very effective. It's been very blessed and I need money.

So I'm coming to you to ask for it. If you have some money that's available in your giving budget and you would like to give it to me for me to pass along to the people and to purchase the things that are gonna need to be done, then that's what it can be used for.

Specifically, I will take your money, I will use it to purchase agricultural supplies which will be planting many acres of gardens. Right now we're targeting to plant about 120 new acres across more than a dozen prisons across Venezuela. We've got quite a lot of stuff prepared for it. And if we can raise enough money, then we can continue to see this program multiply and grow significantly.

And it's been a real tool to provide some very needed relief for men who are hungry and need food and for men who are idle and need work. So if you trust me and you would like to be involved and help partner with me in that work, then I would ask you to go to the link in the show notes or the description for today's podcast episode.

Again, you can use a credit card to donate using a Stripe page that I've set up or you can send me money on PayPal. Both of those are fine. I can't collect any physical donations at the moment. I need electronic money. I can't give you any kind of tax deduction.

You won't receive any tax deduction for your contributions because as I said, there's no tax deductible organization. I have arranged it in the past. If you are going to give a significant amount of money, in the previous fundraising effort, we had a donor who donated a five-figure sum, which we were able to pass through an appropriate tax-exempt organization.

So if you would like to donate a five-figure sum, then contact me. You can email me, joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com, and I can use an appropriate tax-exempt entity to provide stewardship for those specific funds. And those specific funds, what we did in the past was I used the money to buy a vehicle.

And so we were able to have a proper paper trail following all the laws for organized charities. And so we were able to do it as was necessary. So if you would like to donate five figures to me, then reach out to me before you do that, joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com. But I don't need very many five-figure donations.

I'd rather just have more modest three and four-figure donations using the link. And I'll take the money, I'll pass it along, and use it to purchase the supplies and be the steward of it. I will give reports on that as well in the future. You'll see as things happen.

And I'll try to, one of the best things is, I feel more comfortable sharing about a lot of this stuff personally. So like we did at Radical Personal Finance Family Camp, if you come to a family camp, and I'll show you pictures of what we've done in Venezuela, things like that.

So also pray for me. Like I said, I'll be there personally for a conference and touring some of the prisons here in a few weeks. And so it's difficult when you're a father of five, it's difficult to go to a place like Venezuela and feel like you're making the right decision.

But it's something that I believe is important. And so I would ask for your prayers as well. Thank you very much.