The "Justice Club"
Some encouragement from Gary Haugen on the slow work of institution-building
Last month, I hosted Gary Haugen at Washington University for a public dialogue about his life and work during a gathering of the Legal Vocation Fellowship. As I noted in an earlier post, Gary is the founder and CEO of the International Justice Mission, a global Christian organization that combats sex trafficking, child sexual exploitation, cybersex trafficking, forced labor, slavery, property grabbing, and police abuse of power.
My conversation with Gary covered a range of topics, including the early days of the International Justice Mission, the nature of justice, and the importance of finding joy in work. You can watch a video of our dialogue at the end of this post. I’d like to focus on one particular theme of our discussion: the slow and often precarious work of building healthy institutions.
Today, the International Justice Mission is known around the world for its work combatting human trafficking and other evils being perpetrated against vulnerable populations. It has an annual budget of $140 million and 1,500 staff around the globe. But as Gary explained during our dialogue, it wasn’t always this way:
We started by surveying tens of thousands of people who are working amongst the poor, and we asked them one question: Do you see people suffering violence and abuse under circumstances in which local authorities cannot be relied upon for relief? A hundred percent of them said yes.
Okay, there's a need. So let’s start something to try to address it. That means I have to leave my job at the Department of Justice. I have to tell my friends and family at Christmas that I'm going to start a “justice club.” And would you give me $30 a month maybe to help me do that? That put together—what's 11 times $30 a month—that's sort of what I got.
It’s a good reminder that most big visions start small. And the best endeavors usually take a long time and a lot of hard work:
I think we had three successful cases in the first year and that was unbelievable. And we hoped that we could have three the next year. But it was just case by case by case. It was like Mother Teresa used to say. She ended up, I think, pulling about 40,000 people off the streets of Calcutta over her 50 years of service, but she would just say it started with one, and then two, and then three.
These incremental steps are hard enough, but the slow work of building institutions almost always involves setbacks and unanticipated challenges. During our dialogue, I asked Gary for an example of a setback he had encountered while building the International Justice Mission. He responded:
I can tell you exactly the grocery store parking lot I was in, weeping because we had run out of money. At that time, there were five of us, and we were maybe almost two years into the work. And I discovered something I'd never heard of before called “cash flow.” It turns out that just because you have enough money at the end of the year, if you don't have it in between, when you need to pay the people at the organization, your organization ends. So there was a point where we just literally ran out of money. And this was super sad because we were starting to see what was possible.
Gary knew his initial vision was ambitious but also full of risk and the fear of failure:
I was afraid of moving forward with this vision. Not because I was afraid of the violent circumstances that we were stepping into. And not because I had a wife and four kids, and we’re trying to figure out how to pay for life. What I was most afraid of was looking like a failure. To have to go back to that family reunion and be asked “How’s the ‘justice club’ going?” And having to respond: “Yeah, that failed.”
Once I figured out that’s what I was afraid of, then I thought, “Do I want to be 50-something—or 62-years old, like I am now—and know that I never did the thing because I didn't want to look like a failure?” That just felt so pathetic to say. So I decided, let's give it a go.
I can identify with Gary’s fear of failure. Over the past few years, I have wrestled with similar fear as I have stewarded or built various institutions. In each of these cases, I have confronted long periods of worrying about failure. Some of my efforts have failed. And to be honest, that kind of failure is not only discouraging but can also be paralyzing. It’s not easy to try again when the last effort fell short. But few worthwhile endeavors succeed without risking failure along the way.
There is one final thought from Gary that I find helpful to thinking about failure: do it for the things that bring you joy. As Gary and I closed our dialogue, he spoke specifically to the young lawyers in the audience:
If you're not enjoying your life, work a different plan, because God intended for you to enjoy your life. If a lawyer is spending a gazillion hours being a lawyer and doesn’t find meaningful purpose in that, then that's going to be joyless. I've known so many lawyers for so many decades, and the propensity to do stuff that isn't very joyful for a really, really, really long time, I would just recommend not doing that.
Note the tension between Gary’s advice about pursuing joy and his advice about risking failure in taking on big visions. The hard, incremental steps of institution building and other similarly complex efforts will not be joyful at every moment, but they can be part of a joy-filled life.
Gary is also cautioning that some pursuits can lead to prolonged joylessness. In those cases, being open to what we’re doing and why we’re doing it might cause us to pivot elsewhere—to take a different, more meaningful risk. Joy doesn’t come from avoiding risk altogether; it emerges from taking the right risks for the right reasons.
I’m glad that Gary found joy in the risk of starting the “justice club.” And I’m glad he stuck with his vision during long periods of uncertainty, when the joy felt more distant. I hope you’ll also find joy in the risks you take and the institutions you help build.
You can watch the full video of my dialogue with Gary here:
Inspiring