It all started when…

Bishop Stacy F. Sauls, our president, founded Love Must Act in 2016, but our work is much older than that. From 2000-2011, Bishop Sauls led the Episcopal Diocese of Lexington, Kentucky, which includes 14 of the 100 poorest counties in the United States. Bishop Sauls guided the diocese to prioritize the needs of the poor, especially in Appalachia, through education, healthcare, and housing initiatives. This included the diocese’s celebrated Reading Camp program, which Bishop Sauls founded in 2002 to help the children of Appalachia in need of intensive remedial work and to help other Christians experience the transformational love of God lived out through mission rooted in relationship. Reading Camp was successfully replicated in numerous communities in the United States, and also in poor communities around the world, including Liberia, Cameroon, and South Africa.

Following his tenure as Bishop of Lexington, Bishop Sauls served for five years as Chief Operating Officer of the Episcopal Church as a whole and as a Director of Episcopal Relief & Development. During that time he brought relationship with poor communities around the world into the forefront of the Church’s missional work. This focus – which included supporting a partnership between Holy Cross monks in New York and South Africa for the benefit of Holy Cross School in Grahamstown (now Makhanda), South Africa – deepened Bishop Sauls’ understanding that human relationship rooted in love is the predicate to successful development work overseas. He founded Love Must Act in the summer of 2016 to enshrine that understanding in the work of an organization focused on education for the poor.

In 2017, Love Must Act entered a formal agreement with the Order of the Holy Cross to support Holy Cross School in Makhanda, initiating a six-year plan to ensure its stability, expansion, and sustainability. The agreement has now been renewed. This plan entails a robust fundraising strategy focused on grants, grassroots donations that arise out of relationships we help build, major donors, South African sources of income, and the creation of an endowment to ensure against dependence. The success of the Holy Cross partnership has become the model for all subsequent work by Love Must Act, which now includes a program in Gaza.  New opportunities are always being considered.