50 Years of Wheaton’s Human Needs and Global Resources Program
Words: Liuan Chen Huska ’09
Photos: Courtesy of Human Needs and Global Resources
Group photo from the 40th HNGR Anniversary and Symposium.
On a warm day in 1977, in the foothills of eastern Guatemala, Dr. Laura Montgomery ’78 approached a dwelling in an indigenous Mayan village of Ch’orti’ people. She was one of the first four interns Wheaton College sent out from the fledgling Human Needs and Global Resources (HNGR) program.
Montgomery and her peers were tasked with researching and addressing the global hunger crisis, which took millions of lives in the early 1970s. During her internship, she examined the nutritional status of children, studying what food they ate, how people classified nutritious food, and the factors influencing food production.
That day, many adult men were sitting around the dwelling. Montgomery asked if the men were going to work in the fields that day. “We don’t have enough food to eat,” they replied. “We just don’t have the strength to go out and work today.”
Since Montgomery’s time as a HNGR intern, the program has compelled nearly one thousand Wheaton students over five decades to leave their comfort zones and, as the program mission states, “learn to accompany communities worldwide toward justice and fullness of life.” In 2026, the program will celebrate its 50th anniversary.
Scan of mountain and lake film photo with unmarked location from HNGR archives.
1983
“Students are being discipled by faithful leaders in the global church who pursue Christlikeness in very challenging contexts ,” said Dr. Laura Yoder, who has served as the HNGR director since 2013. “This deep, life-orienting formation in students leads most of them to live out their faith intentionally among and for marginalized communities, both professionally and personally, for the rest of their lives.”
Montgomery’s time among the Ch’orti’ profoundly shaped her understanding of the world. “When you live with people who live under very difficult circumstances on a day-to-day basis, you realize many of the theories about why people are poor and what would help people not be poor are woven out of thin air,” she said. “They don’t really reflect the realities and challenges of daily life.”
Montgomery found the Ch’orti’ were malnourished not because they didn’t work hard or didn’t know what foods were healthy, but because they had inadequate access to land. For decades, their communities had been pushed off prime agricultural land by nonindigenous ladino landowners and commodity crop industries, and neglected by the government.
Montgomery, an anthropologist, returned to Wheaton to serve as associate director of the HNGR program from 1985–87. From 2012–23, she served as Wheaton’s Dean of Global Programs and Studies, which directly oversaw the HNGR program. “HNGR remains one of Wheaton’s most impactful programs in terms of students’s intellectual, spiritual, and personal growth,” Montgomery said. “The program has been a very important link to the global church and central to Wheaton’s mission ‘to build the church and benefit society worldwide.’”
FROM THE MARGINS TO THE CENTER
HNGR got its start when, during a 1974 seminar, physics professor Dr. Howard Claassen proposed a global study-service program in response to devastating worldwide famine. Several faculty members, including economist Dr. Norm Ewert HON, political scientist Dr. Mark Amstutz HON, and anthropologist Dr. Dean Arnold ’64, developed a multi-year, academic certificate model which has remained largely the same to this day.
In this model, accepted students from all majors take preparatory courses before being placed for six months with host families and local organizations doing work that matches their vocational interests. Wheaton faculty members visit students halfway through their internship. Then students return to campus for a final semester of debriefing together.
Dr. Sharon Coolidge, Melba Maggay, and Dr. Norm Ewert at the 40th Anniversary HNGR Symposium.
2016
Ewert joined faculty visits to that first group of HNGR interns with Dr. Wayne Bragg ’53, M.A. ’57, the program’s first director from 1976–86. In the Dominican Republic, they visited a student working with a medical doctor. The doctor told them, “One factory up in these hills would do more to promote health than ten good doctors.”
From this and subsequent trips, Ewert realized that poverty is more than lack of money. It has roots in how we order human society. On the flip side, Ewert said, “economics can be done in a way that promotes health, human dignity, and shalom.” Ewert built these insights into his courses, including Small Enterprise and Economic Development, which addressed how to create jobs in various contexts. By his retirement in 2014, Ewert had advised field research projects for 49 interns and visited 34 HNGR interns in 20 different countries, often alongside his wife, English professor Dr. Sharon Coolidge ’72.
In the early years, not everyone was convinced of the program’s value. “People questioned, ‘What is the role of the church? Should we really care about the material conditions of people’s lives?’” Montgomery said.
The campus tone shifted when the program hosted the Wheaton Consultation in 1983, a manifestation of the Lausanne Movement which gathered development workers to discuss the church’s response to global human needs. “It was a catalytic moment,” said Dr. Paul Robinson HON, who directed HNGR from 1999–2013. “It gave this struggling little program global credibility and showed Wheaton’s constituency that the HNGR program was deeply in tune with trends in global Christianity.”
The global church was shifting from a mindset of “from the West to the rest” to a mindset of “from everywhere to everyone,” Robinson said. The HNGR program, led by Dr. Bob Stickney from 1987–99, continued to strengthen its multidisciplinary approach and encourage interns to take the posture of learners and guests.
WELCOMED INTO A LARGER FAMILY
Kelly Wilson ’16 and colleagues from the Fundación San Lucas in Nicaragua.
2016
Kelly Wilson ’16 worked with a small community development organization called Fundación San Lucas in Nicaragua for her HNGR internship. The community was in the middle of a drought. Cows were dying. Farmers couldn’t plant their seed. Wilson spent much of her time talking with people about rains and monitoring rainfall and well levels.
The members of Wilson’s host organization became her second family. As they drove around the community in a pickup truck, her coworkers would point out changes, such as houses without smoke coming from the chimneys. This signaled a family had left the area to make some money elsewhere during the drought. Once out on a drive with coworkers, Wilson mentioned a devotional a coworker had done with community members days earlier: “We just talked about Psalm 23 and you talked about how the goodness of God is pursuing us forever. How is that true in this situation?”
“My team at San Lucas were my main teachers and my primary community,” Wilson said. “They gently taught me about the realities in their country and the past history of their lives. It felt like they adopted me as a daughter.”
Sarah Agee Johnson ’08 and Dr. Christine Kepner at Lake Atitlán in Guatemala.
2007
Sarah Agee Johnson ’08 felt a similar sense of adoption with her host community in Solalá, Guatemala, as she worked on Old Testament Bible videos for Mayan audiences during her internship. She would sit at the kitchen table listening to the 15 people in her host family speak Kaqchikel, the local language. Local women, though they were very poor, would share their homemade corn tortillas with a little bit of protein—cheese, eggs, a cheaper meat. “I felt so alive while I was there, because I was taking the posture of a child,” Johnson said. “It was beautiful just to experience life with them.”
Wilson continues to witness the welcome of the global church toward students and their families, now in her role as HNGR Partnership and Placement Manager. One example comes from Cathy Bernales, mother of Yuri Ben Bernales ’19 who interned in Rwanda with a genocide reconciliation program. Cathy recalls processing the “weird” feeling that her son had another mom. Gradually, she came to feel grateful for the host family’s care. “Releasing family exclusivity meant accepting that Yuri belongs to a bigger family, the universal family of God,” she said.
Some study abroad programs take an island model, where students remain largely within their visiting group throughout the program. “You can go abroad and never leave home,” said Montgomery. But HNGR takes an immersive approach while striking a good balance between challenge and support. During her time at Westmont College, Montgomery developed a study abroad program in Mexico based on the HNGR program’s strengths—“really thorough preparation and bookending that with reentry.” This strength, Montgomery said, has developed over time.
OUT OF LAMENT, HOPE
Paul Robinson, Director of HNGR from 1999–2013.
When Robinson became HNGR director in 1999, he noticed students had a particularly hard time returning to campus and facing the stark differences between having their own needs easily met and members of their host communities living without sufficient food, health care, or other basics. “Students were overwhelmed,” Robinson said. “They didn’t have a language to describe what they had been going through.”
Robinson understood then that the HNGR program was not only about international development, but also about spiritual formation. “So often Protestant Evangelicalism has been overwhelmingly triumphalist,” he said. “God is in control. Everything’s going to be hunky dory.” But HNGR students confront some of the deepest pain and suffering in the human experience. Robinson asked, “How do we do that with our faith and theology intact?”
Robinson brought in the work of South African theologian Denise Ackermann, who had wrestled with her country’s apartheid. Ackermann also visited campus in 2009. She taught students and faculty a language of lament, which is present throughout the Bible. “Out of lament, we begin to explore a language of radical hope,” Robinson said, “which gives us the courage to believe a different world is possible.”
Ackermann’s book, After the Locusts: Letters from a Landscape of Faith (Eerdmans, 2003), remains core reading for HNGR students. In it she writes, “My trust is not in some abstract God in the heavens pulling strings on which we dangle as puppets, or some judge doling out favors to the faithful, but a living God who is present in human history and whose divine energy continues to woo us into the fullness of life, now and beyond.”
SPURRING CAMPUS ENGAGEMENT
When the original committee developed HNGR, they aimed for students to address global issues of hunger and poverty directly. But they also wanted interns’s experiences to speak back to the campus community. Furthering this end, the annual HNGR symposium started in 2005 with funding from the John Deere Foundation. The symposium convenes hundreds of attendees each year from the college community and beyond to dialogue with guest speakers on challenging issues like global mental health, climate change, and immigration.
In 2013, the John Stott Human Needs and Global Resources Endowment (made in honor of Stott by anonymous friends of the College) enabled even deeper collaboration between Wheaton College and the global church. The Stott Endowment funds student scholarships; international visiting scholars, artists, and practitioners; faculty research grants; faculty research leave; and a Stott Fellows faculty cohort program—all aimed at bringing voices of the global church into campus conversations.
View of Nicolas de Pierola Avenue from Plaza San Martín in Lima, Peru.
1983
Faculty members have always had opportunities to visit students on their internships, but these initiatives allow professors to work with partners around the world for months and even years. “It deepens the engagement pretty substantially with faculty who then teach the whole campus,” Yoder said.
Assistant Professor of Psychology Dr. Chuck Liu ’08 was a HNGR intern as an undergraduate and recently spent a semester in Thailand in 2024 as a Stott Fellow. He worked with the Cornerstone Counseling Foundation serving international missionaries and locals to launch research on southeast Asian cultural beliefs on mental health and illness. Because psychological frameworks largely come from a Euro-American perspective, Liu said, they can overlook the resources inherent in other contexts. “How do you find the strength, values, and beauty within a specific culture and make that the foundation for how you’re developing interventions and your understanding of mental wellness?” he asked.
Through these ongoing relationships, the College develops broad networks with the global church in the majority world. And, Yoder added, opportunities like this help faculty members who haven’t previously been involved with HNGR see how their work connects with meeting human needs.
BEYOND THE INTERNSHIP
HNGR’s impact extends far beyond the six-month internship. It changes the way students and faculty understand their vocation, how they teach, and how they live.
Kalei Hosaka ’16 with mentors in India.
2015
Kalei Hosaka ’16 worked with Shalom Delhi in India, a health clinic serving people with HIV/AIDS, for his HNGR internship. Now an internal medicine-pediatrics resident at UCLA, Hosaka traces his own posture as a physician back to his time at Shalom. “Medical training, with its evaluative, hierarchical process, is a constant pull away from the realities that people experience,” Hosaka said. “We have a tendency to see ourselves as distant from the lives of patients. The ways that I saw my mentors in India live and work, from a compassionate sense of solidarity with people, is something I come back to a lot as I work out my larger vocation.”
When he was a student, Dr. Paul McNamara ’83 studied issues of land conflict in a rural Filipino village for his HNGR internship. Back then, he paid elders of the local church the equivalent of $60 to build him a 10-by-10-foot nipa hut, a traditional stilt house with a thatch roof. It took the elders one week to finish. McNamara’s HNGR experience directed his existing interests in business and public finance toward helping communities on the margins, whether in rural Illinois or West Africa.
Yuri Bernales ’19 with Professor Joonhee Park on safari during a faculty visit to Bernales’ HNGR internship in Rwanda.
2018
Now an agricultural economics professor at the University of Illinois, he has built a study-abroad program in collaboration with a university in Sierra Leone with the same philosophy as HNGR—to engage students in real-world issues face to face. “The whole point of the HNGR program is that we’re not going to just read about this in books,” McNamara said. “We’re going to join in on it.”
Associate Professor of Spanish Dr. Christine Kepner has been visiting HNGR interns in Latin America almost every year since the early 1990s. Kepner’s visits, and her ongoing relationships with partner organizations, have challenged her to live in ways that reflect Christ’s kingdom and values. “What do I choose to eat? How do I spend my money? How do I support the church? How do I manage my budget? How do I share what I have?” These are the nitty-gritty discipleship questions that Kepner and her family ask regularly.
In her teaching, Kepner also seeks to pass on a broader vision for ministry. “How do we look beyond our very American values of individualism, property, and flourishing to expand into a more biblical and just view of flourishing?” she said.
THE GLOBAL BODY OF CHRIST
In 2020, pandemic border closures forced the HNGR program to pivot quickly from international to domestic placements. “That really enabled us to develop a whole new suite of placements with migrants and underserved communities and in different regions facing economic challenges, from major urban areas in the United States to rural communities and postindustrial towns,” Yoder said.
The pandemic also underscored a deeper truth. “The world can be a hard place for most of its people,” Robinson said. “Our call is into those places. Sometimes they’re far away. Sometimes they’re with our neighbor next door.”
For the past 50 years, the HNGR program has sought to give Wheaton students and faculty an experiential, global, and gospel-oriented lens to address human needs, whether at home or abroad. “Those issues, those global happenings that you read about in the news—all of a sudden they have faces,” Liu said. “They are your friends, your host family, the people you go to church with. When you see people giving graciously not out of abundance but out of scarcity, and you are the recipient of it, you really learn on a visceral and embodied level what it means to receive the love of God and be a global body of Christ.”
HNGR student cohort.
1980
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