Lessons on ministering, community building, and creating lasting social impact through faith.
Social impact practitioners spend a great deal of time asking a foundational question: How can we do the greatest good?
At the Ballard Center for Social Impact at BYU Marriott, students and staff alike learn to approach a social issue by identifying root causes, building cross-sector collaborations, designing scalable solutions, and evaluating impact to strengthen individuals and communities. While these tools are essential, they do not tell the whole story.
The Ballard Center also believes that faith is the power behind why we serve, how we lead, and what flourishing communities look like.
These ideas come to life in Dr. Eva Witesman’s appearance on the followHIM podcast1, where she joined hosts Hank Smith and Jon Bytheway to discuss Doctrine and Covenants 81-88, canonical scripture for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Drawing on both her scholarship in social impact and her faith, Witesman explored themes of stewardship, ministering, leadership, and community, showing how these revelations shape the way we serve others.
Throughout the conversation, Witesman demonstrated the mutually reinforcing nature of both pure religion and effective social impact, inviting listeners to consider not only what they can do to serve others, but also who they can become in the process.
“Succor the Weak”
A central passage of scripture that was discussed in the podcast was Doctrine and Covenants 81:4-5.
As the hosts reflected on this verse, Witesman pointed to it as a concise expression of God’s priorities. In a world where the impact of success is often measured by the grandiosity of an intervention or the visibility of a project, this scripture shifts the focus to people. Social impact is not merely a measure of accomplished tasks but instead is focused on caring for individuals and co-creating solutions so they can flourish
The invitation is clear: succor the weak. The greatest good someone can do is to succor, lift up, and strengthen one person at a time.
Start With the People You Know
In the context of the Ballard Center, this looks like intentional, faithful, human-centered service. Lasting change becomes possible when the needs of individual people anchor the work. This often means that we focus on the people in front of us.
Witesman shared her application of this idea and how it serves as the basis for Ballard Center curriculum. She reflects,
We encourage our students to actually start in their own network to identify the people that they know and love and care about who are struggling with something, to minister to them through service, to learn from them what the challenges are that they’re experiencing.
She pointed to Ballard Labs, where students test the principles they learn in the classroom through real-world social impact work. In one project, a group of students were assigned to research homelessness.
Like many people facing a complex issue, the students initially focused on homelessness at a systems level. However, they were soon challenged to narrow their focus: find one specific person experiencing homelessness.
That shift changed everything.
Rather than asking, “How do we solve homelessness?” the students pivoted to asking, “What barriers is this person facing?” The problem became more personal, more nuanced, and fundamentally more actionable.
By working alongside individuals at this level, the students discovered opportunities that would not have been considered had they continued focusing on designing solutions for homelessness at a larger scale.
Upon reflection, Witesman observed,
If we can solve this problem for you in your life, we can actually scale this in our community and help so many other people [...] The only way it will work is if we have individuals in communities working together to solve the problems that they’re witnessing in their own communities, and then a global network of people doing that kind of ministering is how we solve global problems.
This insight is subtle but profound. We often assume that helping more people means moving beyond the individual. Witesman suggests the opposite. Meaningful impact is often achieved by diving deeper into an issue and consulting with those it affects, not just by expanding the size of the intervention. It starts with the individual, and those that minister to them. If we can replicate that process of individual care across communities and populations, we can create real, lasting change.
How Communities Flourish
Beginning with one person, however, does not mean ending with one person. As we are successful in our efforts to help and lift singular individuals, the need for community support and engagement becomes critical. When speaking on the root causes of poverty, Witesman explained how community connections can play a vital role:
In most cases, poverty is actually a breakdown of society, social networks and people that you can rely on. It's the absence of family that you can turn to in a hard time and the absence of a community that you can count on to step in when your family can't.
This perspective challenges a common assumption that poverty is primarily a lack of financial resources. While financial resources matter, Witesman suggests that many of society's greatest challenges are rooted in fractured relationships and weakened communities.
For people of faith, that insight also amplifies what it means to "succor the weak." If poverty is partly the absence of connection, then ministering, or building intentional connections with others, becomes more than meeting those immediate needs. It becomes the work of rebuilding trust, belonging, and community.
In that sense, communities are more than the recipients of social impact—they are the mechanism through which it happens.
Conclusion
So, how can we do the greatest good?
For individuals within a Christian faith, seeking to do good is intrinsically tied to a belief in Jesus Christ. It requires a willingness to “lift up the hands which hang down, and strengthen the feeble knees,” (Doctrine and Covenants 81:5). That willingness is made manifest in the concerted effort to nurture relationships, build solutions for individual people, and engage in the work of strengthening God’s children and the communities where they live.
"These aren't two separate works. It's not the temporal work of helping the poor and those in need, and then the spiritual work of salvation. Those are one and the same,” Witesman shares.
As we seek to do the greatest good, we can follow Christ's example by meeting both temporal and spiritual needs with compassion, purpose, and love.
Viewpoints published by the Ballard Center are not necessarily endorsed by BYU or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.