Using Skills for Service - Becky Douglas' Remarks

Becky Douglas was on the "Using Your Skills for Service: Serving in the Church and Community" Panel of the Women in Business Conference. She is a co-founder of Rising Star Outreach, a non-profit working with leprosy colonies in India. These are her reconstructed notes of her remarks on the panel.

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Unlike the others on the panel, I didn't bring any management skills to my area of service; instead I had the reverse formula: I gained Management Skills as a result of my service.

As a mother of ten children, I didn't have time to pursue and develop business management skills. When I started Rising Star Outreach, it was by inviting three friends (all homemakers) to join me around my kitchen table. I also pulled in my husband's secretary--mostly, because she didn't dare say no!

I quickly found out that I needed quite an array of Management Skills in order to run an international charity. Some of those included

• Raising millions of dollars to support the cause. That involves speaking at engagements across the United States, and sometimes in foreign countries.
• Obtaining government and legal licensing both in America and in India for the charity and to run schools.
• Running an overseas operation with 55 native employees in India.
• Putting together and leading two Boards of Directors; one in India, one in America.
• Overseeing accounting and auditing teams in both America and in India. (When I started Rising Star, I didn't even know what a spreadsheet was!)
• Creating and sustaining four thousand micro-businesses through micro-finance.
• Overseeing teams of doctors & nurses running mobile medical units to provide needed medical care to over 50 leprosy colonies in three very diverse States in India. Providing for hospitalizations and surgeries.
• Running elementary and secondary boarding schools, providing teacher training, and curriculum for schools in India. Also providing training for housemothers.
• Producing newsletters and keeping Sponsors communicating with children across the world.
• Running a volunteer program involving 250 volunteers a year; including travel arrangements and programs on the ground. Providing opportunities for interns. Providing study abroad opportunities for colleges.
• Setting up social networking campaigns including FaceBook pages, Twitter accounts, and blogs. Also create and maintain an international data bank.
• Running publicity campaigns including production and marketing of documentaries; creating a website, creating pamphlets, giving interviews for newspapers, television, and radio around the world.
• Overseeing personnel matters in organizations across two continents.
• Running arts programs, including a dance program involving dancers from Broadway and the top dance conservatories in America, as well as the creation of choruses, and supporting art schools for the leprosy-affected.
  

I had none of these skills when I helped to found Rising Star. I just felt that something needed to be done to help those affected by leprosy in India, so I took action.

The good news is that I've been able to slowly develop the needed skills. The skills that were beyond me, I was fortunate in that, in every instance, God provided someone who had the skills we needed. So I challenged the conference attendees not to hesitate to get involved in meeting needs out of fear that they didn't have the necessary management skills. At Rising Star Outreach, we frequently marvel that we seem to live the parable of the Fishes and the Loaves every day. We provide the two fishes and the five loaves of bread, then we marvel at how God makes it feed 5,000! God owns the universe, and my experience is that He brings it to those who lift their hands to help the disadvantaged and the the downtrodden. He knows how to do His work! We need to try to move ahead with faith in His promises.

Discussion ensued about the demands of home and family. A question was asked about a "time and a season for all things". I replied that I had spent 25 years raising my ten children before starting Rising Star Outreach. During that time there were many opportunities for service that helped prepare me for the work I'm doing today.

It seems that, as women, we almost all face times when we have to make decisions in balancing our homemaking duties and our outside interests. Like everyone else, I've also had these struggles. As a trained professional violinist, I earlier had to decide how best to pursue my career without compromising care of my children. At one point, with a number of children, it became an impossibility for me to continue performing at a professional level without seriously impacting their growth and my commitment to them. Each of us has to make these decisions based upon our own inspiration and personal revelation. What we don't have to do--thank goodness--is judge anyone else's decision!

I commented that I have to answer to a lot of people. I have to answer to my Boards of Directors, to my major donors, to government agencies, to sponsors, and to the parents of the children in our schools. However, the most serious accounting I will ever have to do will be to my Eternal Heavenly Father, for how I treated and trained His own children that He entrusted to me. I encouraged participants to follow the guidelines of the Proclamation on the Family. What a blessing it is to have prophets to guide and help us!