Alyssa Minor has a story to tell.
“I remember one night in particular. I had been having a really hard day, wondering if I could do (the work in Ghanian orphanages), when I saw the older children out dancing and asked if I could try. I put on their traditional clothing and then I got out there and I was dancing in the rain with them and that was a turning point for me,” said Minor. “I immersed myself in their culture. Loving the things that makes them them, including their culture,” is when the idea of “Love the One” really hit home.
“Love the One” is the first step in the cycle of social change described by Eva Witesman, the director of the Ballard Center for Social Impact at BYU. Instead of jumping to solutions, a common approach in the nonprofit world, Witesman asks her students to “fall in love with the problem,” and even more specifically, “the one.” “We could map the complex systems of global poverty forever and never finish, hoping to wrap our minds around an impossible problem in hopes of solving it, and yet never make a change,” said Witesman. “Or we can effectively reduce suffering for one person by mapping their specific experiences and working at that scale.” Solving social problems by first focusing on “the one” is a methodology Witesman is passionate about.
“We are less concerned with which solution are we using, because no solution is THE solution,” nor is one solution going to be a permanent solution, Witesman said. “We believe in an iterative process where you’re constantly co-designing that intervention with the people who have the lived experience that you’re working with. Because of that,” Witesman said, “we don’t get attached to an organization or an intervention. We fall in love with solving the problem” that impacts “the one.”
Minor experienced learning to love the one after spending last summer in Ghana. A student at Brigham Young University minoring in global and community impact through the Ballard Center, she spent the summer researching child abuse in the country’s orphanages. For the first six weeks she was in Ghana, she spent her time analyzing processes, looking at documents and talking to government officials, while also keeping herself removed emotionally and physically from the children who actually lived in an orphanage.
That emotional distance changed when she embedded herself in the orphanage and fell in love with the children there.
“It became personal,” she said. She became committed to “fight through the hard stuff, and work through the challenges of solving problems because it’s not about ‘solving the problem,’ but ‘I love you and I will do anything to alleviate your suffering.’” Her time in Ghana changed her profoundly, she said. It changed her outlook on her future family, her career path and her educational goals. She is now committed to pursuing a law degree and a Master of Public Administration and then a doctorate in family studies so she can spend her life working on structural change that will impact “the one.”
Minor says the Ballard Center “holds her heart.”
The Melvin J. Ballard Center for Social Impact
When the Ballard Center opened its doors in 2003, it was the Center for Economic Reliance at the BYU Marriott School of Business. In 2010, the center was named the Melvin J. Ballard Center for Economic Self-Reliance, after Melvin J. Ballard, architect of the modern welfare program for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Its mission was to give students the necessary tools to help individuals and families everywhere become self-reliant. In 2020, the name was changed to the Melvin J. Ballard Center for Social Impact to better encompass the broad scope of the work done by the center.
Witesman, the Center’s current director, praised her predecessor for his vision and leadership in founding the center. “Todd Manwaring founded this center and led it for the first twenty years. The work we are doing now builds directly on the knowledge and experience he generously shared over his impressive career of service.”
Currently, The Ballard Center for Social Impact has students from all colleges and nearly 90% of all departments. Each academic year, more than 3,000 students participate in its “classes, competitions, internships, research, and employment opportunities and with an additional 6,000+ students participating in events such as the Peery Film Series and TEDxBYU.” The center has been designated as a Changemaker Campus by Ashoka U, the leading supporter of social impact education at universities throughout the world.
For students who want a deeper experience than participating in a research project, or attending a single class, for example, undergraduate students can get a minor in Global and Community Impact and MBA students can choose a Social Impact emphasis. Students from multiple disciplines across campus come to the Ballard Center to learn from a variety of professors who generally teach most of their classes in other departments.
The current mission of the Ballard Center is to develop the faith and skills to solve social problems — and to “Do Good. Better.” Sometimes the desire to do good doesn’t always mean that good is done. For example, sending clothes to refugees that are inappropriate for the weather or the culture or the living situation (eg: high heels in a refugee camp) not only is not helpful, it adds additional burdens on those who are on the receiving end to do something with the unhelpful donations.
Students touched by the Ballard Center don’t learn one way to manage a nonprofit, or understand one theory of change. Rather, they learn to work through an entire cycle that starts with “Loving the One,” then moves through identifying and understanding the problem, specifying an outcome, and co-creating solutions with the people they are trying to help, rather than “imposing” a solution that may not be helpful and could even be harmful. Then, the team implements the proposed intervention, measures and evaluates, iterates as needed and, finally, looks at scaling the intervention to be able to serve “the many.”
Students from dozens of majors, and professors from multiple disciplines across campus, take or teach classes on social impact, including human-centered design thinking for social impact, alleviating poverty, international health, impact investing and the sociology of international development. Undergraduate students can minor in Global and Community Impact, or, Master of Business Administration students can add an MBA Social Impact Emphasis.
Witesman, one of only two full-time professors with the center, doesn’t just teach her students about iterative processes in the classroom. Through the Ballard Center’s Social Impact labs, she gets them out in the field. Students like Minor work on real-life problems, both locally and internationally, and gain valuable, first-hand experience. The Ballard Center offers community-engaged learning while developing thought leadership in their students.
Here are the challenges student teams are currently working on:
- Poverty alleviation in the Andean region, in concert with the BYU Andean Region Initiative headed by international vice president Renata Forste
- Homelessness along the Wasatch Front, focusing specifically on single women-led families
- Global drought and flood early warning with 50 women in Central America, in conjunction with the BYU College of Engineering
- The Great Salt Lake, with a specific focus on low-income residents in west Salt Lake Valley
- Air pollution in Nepal, also in conjunction with the BYU College of Engineering.
- Black Diaspora performance lab, seeking to improve the experience of Black students at BYU.
“My favorite thing about teaching social impact is watching the joy and the passion in the students that I teach because they so very much want to just take this world and make it better,” said Witesman.
When asked what appeals to her in her current role, she said, “It’s a work that I have felt called to since I was a little girl. I remember being in fifth grade and my best friend asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up. I gave a list of 10 different helping professions. I don’t know how but I want to be all of those things.” In her role as director of the Ballard Center, she has been able to mesh those different professions together.
“This has always been in me. To be here and look back, I realize this has always been my trajectory. I feel like I am home.”
