Jason Jones, Executive Director of the movie “Bella” and Founder of The Vulnerable People Project, chats with Father Dave about his work helping the most vulnerable, especially those currently fleeing Ukraine.
Jason shares how his organization, which works to promote respect for the dignity of every person, started helping people evacuate Afghanistan back in the summer.
“In early August, we started getting inundated with requests for evacuation. I started leveraging my friends at different government agencies and [working] with larger organizations to get the folks who requested help out of the country. But it became obvious to me very soon that everyone was going to leave. Things in Afghanistan are worse than ever. We are one of the last organizations left in the country. This winter, we’ve delivered over 50,000 families four months worth of food and coal. We’re also doing emergency evacuations for people being targeted by the Taliban every single day.”
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“About two weeks ago we started getting inundated with requests for help in Ukraine. We have learned a lot over the past six months in Afghanistan, and we were able to swing into action pretty quickly and launch our Hope for Ukraine Initiative which works to get medical supplies and shuttles to those in need.”
Jason shares that while this is very important work, it takes a toll on all those who are working so hard to protect the vulnerable. “I have learned to try and distance myself and balance responsibilities. With Afghanistan, we had two employees have nervous breakdowns. One had to be hospitalized. I didn’t sleep for two and a half weeks. It is overwhelming when you’re helping somebody, and then they get shot, [or harmed in some way] Like in our case, two girls in Afghanistan were killed, set on fire by the Taliban. Same thing in Ukraine… We hear a lot of these stories.”
Father Dave asks Jason what motivates him to do this type of difficult work. “My inciting incident for all of this started as a young 17-year-old infantryman while I was at basic training. My high school girlfriend was hiding her pregnancy, and her father forced her to get a third trimester abortion. And I was out of state, incapable of protecting my own child from violence. That’s what launched me, a young atheist at the time, into the pro-life movement. And I didn’t even know of the pro-life movement. It really burned in my brain that I wanted to live between the violent and the vulnerable. So my apostolate today is getting between the vulnerable and the violent, particularly with genocide, deicide, total war, and abortion.”
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Jason says the last thing he expected as an atheist was to end up in the Catholic Church. “I was searching for anthropology to support the self-evident dignity of the human person. I looked everywhere. The last place I wanted to look was the Catholic Church. But I read John Paul II’s “Love and Responsibility” and that really connected some dots for me. C.S. Lewis called himself “the most reluctant convert,” I was very reluctant of course, until I was baptized and received the Eucharist, and I ceased being reluctant. But it was also the writings of René Girard, the great Catholic anthropologist from Stanford. To me, he has the key for us, which is that we are to live our life in solidarity with the vulnerable, and to do that always comes at a cost. And if it doesn’t come at a cost, then you’re probably in an exploitative relationship with communities to become wealthy or famous… When you truly are committed to serving the vulnerable it comes at a real cost. That’s what true solidarity is. René Girard said, ‘When you’re truly in solidarity with the vulnerable you become indistinguishable from the person who is vulnerable. That’s what our faith has taught the world.”