Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Stephen Hale. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Stephen, thanks for joining us today. What sort of legacy are you hoping to build. What do you think people will say about you after you are gone, what do you hope to be remembered for?

Every morning, when I get out of bed, I know that I will spend my day working to make the world better. To be precise, I think of that in terms of my faith, “I’m helping the world reflect the Kingdom of God today.” For me, that means finding broken parts of the world, of human civilization, and helping to fix those broken things.

I have been able to do that through my work at Inalienable, a human rights organization that knows how to reduce extreme poverty. While my work as Director of Operations is a lot of paperwork and spreadsheets, it supports our indigenous human rights lawyers on the ground. They, in their turn, are giving people the basic control over their own lives most Americans take for granted. That means my life is spent making the world better.

I get to do that in my work at Capital Hope Media, where we tell stories of non-profits and religious organizations doing the same sort of thing. We say we are “telling stories of a world gone good.” What that really means is we support those world-changers with visual story-telling. Some of that supports their missions, and some supports their fundraising (which supports their mission).

I often wonder, “when I am laying on my deathbed, reflecting on my life, what will I think of today?” To be honest, asking that question too much is a recipe for depression! But I think it’s wise to ask it occasionally.
The last few years I have been excited when I think that way: I know my life is improving the world around me. It’s a great life I get to live.

Stephen, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I have two career paths, which have occasionally overlapped.

I started working in churches right after high school. I was an Audio/Visual tech, musician, and youth leader. At the same time, a mentor recommended I read a book “Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger.” That book blew my mind. The first half was about the consistent call in the Bible to take care of the poor and marginalized. Honestly, as a son of fundamentalism, that already surprised me. The second half was about what global poverty actually looks like. Understanding the scale of that problem, framed as a question of Christian ethics, shook me deeply.

A few years later, Bono started talking about global poverty. That really motivated me to focus on Economic Development in college.

Through that, I helped start Inalienable in 2014 with some colleagues. After years of research in a specific community of indigenous Mexicans, we realized we had a transformative idea. As we critiqued it from the standards of postcolonialism, critics of international aid like William Easterly, and basic questions of efficacy, we realized our approach was powerful, and actually worked without intervening much in the lives of people around the world.

The thing Inalienable does that’s incredible is just that: it’s a low-intervention program that returns access to basic rights to people (typically indigenous, internal migrants) who had them taken away. That liberates them to pursue their own best interest. Our impact evaluations have shown over 80% of our clients benefit from this quickly.

Our team of indigenous lawyers works with people who cannot document their citizenship in their own country. This cuts off their access to all sorts of basic services, such as healthcare, schools, bank accounts, and jobs in the formal economy. When they acquire the documents to prove their citizenship, it allows them to benefit from their own hard work. It’s transformative, but it comes by focusing on poverty as a human rights question, not an economic one.

As for Capital Hope Media, I worked in churches for decades. In that time, I was typically a creative, though often in small churches that didn’t really know what to do with that. I remember thinking “why does everything all of these churches produce look so crappy?!” So I decided to do something about it, and threw myself into photography and video, and graphic design. That was about fifteen years ago. Since then, I’ve used that for other nonprofits and businesses.

When the pandemic hit, I saw an opportunity to start a company focused on video and storytelling in churches and nonprofits. So we’ve been doing that. I create a lot of shorter-form video projects, mini-documentaries or YouTube content, advertisements or stories. Then I help organizations learn to run all of this equipment for themselves. That’s both training people to run the hardware, but also helping them think through what they’re trying to accomplish.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

I think creativity is more like problem-solving than most people expect. There are typically some basic skills that serve as the foundation of your craft. For example, in videography you have the way lenses and image sensors work, in music you have scales and basic rules of harmony. So most creatives aren’t going to violate those parameters, most of the time. Then the goal you are working toward provides some structure. If you are creating a 15-second YouTube ad, or a documentary, these both provide a structure. If you can begin with the ending in mind, your creative process becomes more about exploring a restricted set of options. That’s where the creativity comes in: how do I accomplish this goal in the most effective way possible? How can I inspire the response in my client’s audience that we want?

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

What gets me out of bed in the morning is knowing that I am making the world better. I want to give my energy to that. When I am approaching the end of my life, I want to know that I gave everything I had to that goal.

I have generally prioritized being what we called in college “multi-disciplinary.” It’s important to me to be good at a few different things. At any one thing, perhaps there is someone better, of course. But the fact that I can pull on multiple disciplines gives me a certain strength and flexibility.

I like having multiple ways in my life that I’m making the world better, and this multi-disciplinary approach to that is a core part of who I am. I can’t imagine my life without Inalienable, even though Inalienable is not my full-time gig. Similarly, I love the creativity, and people work, that comes with Capital Hope Media. It lets me see the great work other people are doing, and highlight that good work.  

Contact Info:

• Website: www.CapitalHopeMedia.com or www.inalienable.life
• Instagram: @CapitalHopeMedia @Inalienable.life @elsteve9
• Facebook: /CapitalHopeMedia /TheBodyOfChristHasAids /Inalienable.life
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenphale/

Image Credits
Stephen Hale