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- Brad Otto, pastor of Messiah Lutheran Church, Cypress, Texas, started a nonprofit, Acts of Wisdom, which addresses the needs of schools across Ethiopia, Liberia and Uganda. Photo: Courtesy of Brad Otto
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- Dick Moeller at the inauguration of a well at a Ugandan school. He started the nonprofit Water to Thrive, which helps bring clean, safe water to communities. Photo: Courtesy of Dick Moeller
Like the small mustard seed that grows into the greatest of all shrubs, two Texas Lutherans who started with a sense of call to do something about desperate needs in Africa for educational resources and safe drinking water have watched their responses grow into two nonprofits that have benefited thousands of lives in five African countries.
Brad Otto, pastor of Messiah Lutheran Church in Cypress, Texas, was inspired to establish Acts of Wisdom after taking a trip to Africa with Dick Moeller, founder of Water to Thrive. Since Otto incorporated Acts of Wisdom as a nonprofit in 2014, it has provided books and other educational resources to over 7,200 students in Ethiopia, Liberia and Kenya. Since 2008, Water to Thrive has installed 2,000 wells in Ethiopia, Uganda and Tanzania, providing safe drinking water for over a million people.
Water to Thrive
Moeller was inspired to provide safe drinking water in Africa during an adult Sunday school class at Triumphant Love Lutheran Church in Austin, Texas, in 2007. That day, fellow member and friend Ed Scharlau invited the A Glimmer of Hope Foundation to speak to the class about the extreme water crisis in Ethiopia. The friends challenged their class to raise funds to build a couple wells.
“After one month, our Sunday school had funded six,” Moeller said. “Within 90 days, as the whole congregation got involved, we’d funded 12 projects. It was a God thing. People spread the word, and more people got involved.”
Moeller’s life changed course after his congregation’s strong response to funding wells. He applied his corporate and entrepreneurial experiences to incorporate Water to Thrive as a nonprofit. Today the organization leads two or three trips a year to African sites where new wells dramatically improve lives. Without such wells, women and children walk an average of six hours a day, hauling water from the nearest source. Lack of safe water causes serious health issues and keeps children from attending school.
“After one month, our Sunday school had funded six [wells]. Within 90 days, as the whole congregation got involved, we’d funded 12 projects.”
About $3,000, or half of the $6,000 that Water to Thrive needs for each new well, comes from donors. The rest comes from churches, service clubs, schools and occasional grants. Donors receive detailed information about the well they helped facilitate, including the GPS coordinates so they can locate it online.
Moeller ran Water to Thrive as a volunteer director for six years. Today, Brint Patrick handles day-to-day operations as the nonprofit’s executive director, freeing up Moeller to lead the trips to worksites in Africa.
“We pay local partners to handle the necessary work in their countries, providing jobs as well as access to water,” Patrick said. “We find local partners who are experts both in their cultures and in water, sanitation and hygiene, and we ensure that they share our same values of serving their communities.”
Acts of Wisdom
Otto’s initial nudge to do something began on a trip to Costa Rica and Nicaragua with Michael Birnbaum, an adjunct professor at Texas Lutheran University, Seguin. “I spent most of my time under a mango tree, listening to a little boy named Jimmy read to me,” Otto recalled. “He wanted to be a teacher someday, but sadly that dream wouldn’t come true for him, as it doesn’t come true for many children around the world. Most boys in Nicaragua wind up working with the drug lords, and the girls become prostitutes. That was my first look at poverty that close, and it changed me.”
Otto took others from Messiah on his 2013 Ethiopian trip. “I saw this same kind of poverty I’d seen in Central America, especially the huge crisis in education, and it tugged on me,” he said. “I asked questions like, ‘Where are the books for kids?’ They had only one book for every 10 kids in the rural areas. Students had to wait for their turn to get the book. By the time a student got the book, the class might be on a different topic.
“Communities might have schools built, but no students were using them because they didn’t have desks, books or even chalkboards. This just seemed wrong to me.”
After that trip, Otto said, he felt called to do something about it. “I’d never started a nonprofit,” he said, “though working as a pastor in a congregation is a good experience for that.”
“Communities might have schools built, but no students were using them because they didn’t have desks, books or even chalkboards. This just seemed wrong to me.”
Once Acts of Wisdom was granted nonprofit status, its new board decided to start fundraising the $3,500 needed to supply one school in Robit, Ethiopia, with books for one grade. Today the organization supports four schools in Ethiopia, one in Liberia and one in Kenya. Its efforts have reduced the school dropout rate from 35% to 9%, and the schools it support consistently achieve top-ranking student performance.
Acts of Wisdom plans to raise funds for a new school building in Liberia that will increase the school’s capacity from 180 to 700 students. The new building will feature a computer and science lab, along with a full cafeteria. In the future, the cafeteria will also house a church-led community feeding program.
Otto and Moeller have an Ethiopian associate, Yohannes Wassie, who works with both nonprofits. He is one of the local partners with Water to Thrive and an in-country staff member of Acts of Wisdom, overseeing delivery of supplies and monitoring what’s happening in the schools that receive those materials. He’s become a valuable team member for both Texas-based nonprofits.
Reminiscent of the concept that faith the size of a mustard seed can move mountains, Otto and Moeller have grown their compassion for others into two nonprofits that address seemingly impossible problems, blessing thousands of people with the chance for an education and safe water to drink along the way.
