A Different Perspective on Caring for the Orphan | Elli Oswald | Episode 417
The Speakeasy
The Girl Named Blake
4.8 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 10 June 2026
⏱️ 53 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode is an invitation to rethink what we mean by orphan care and how Christians can best support vulnerable children around the world.
I sat down with Elli Oswald, Executive Director of Faith to Action, for a conversation about orphan care and global missions. Elli brings over a decade of experience in global child welfare and shares why many organizations are shifting focus from institutional care toward strengthening families.
Key takeaways:
- The majority of children in orphanages worldwide have living family, poverty separates them, not death
- Children thrive when they stay with family or in family-based environments
- Elli's story of Knabs shows how family tracing efforts reunited nearly every child in a Sierra Leone orphanage with their families
- The church's role is ensuring our giving creates the best outcomes
- Strengthening families before separation happens is more effective than caring for children after crisis
This episode isn't about criticizing generosity, it's about channeling our compassion toward lasting stability, healing, and belonging. Whether your heart is for international missions, foster care, adoption, or serving vulnerable families, this conversation offers a fresh perspective on what effective compassion looks like.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, friends. Welcome to the speakeasy. This is the space where we pull up a chair. We get honest. We |
| 0:05.2 | keep our eyes on Jesus. I am your host, Blake, and today I have Ellie Oswald with me. She is the |
| 0:11.2 | executive director of Faith to Action, and she is someone who has spent a decade on the front |
| 0:17.1 | lines of global orphan care. And she is here to ask a question that a lot of us haven't really thought to ask, |
| 0:24.3 | what if the way that we have been giving in terms of global orphan care |
| 0:30.6 | is actually working against the kids we're trying to help? |
| 0:34.5 | What if the system that we have been supporting isn't actually what's best for the kids |
| 0:41.4 | that scripturally, and I think just deep in our hearts, we care for and we want to see the best for. |
| 0:48.9 | I don't want to spoil it any more than that, so let's get into it. |
| 0:57.7 | Hey, I'm welcome to this peat-easy. Thank you. Thanks for having me. |
| 1:02.3 | We were chatting a little bit before starting recording. This is a really interesting conversation. |
| 1:06.8 | I'm sure by like the title and description, people are a little like, oh, this is an interesting |
| 1:13.3 | angle to the conversation of adoption, orphan care, and how the church intersects with that. |
| 1:25.0 | And it's a different, like I said, it's a different angle. But it's one that I was |
| 1:31.5 | telling you before starting, before I started recording that God's really been untangling in me |
| 1:35.0 | personally. And so I'm really excited to jump into it. But I think before we get into, |
| 1:39.1 | you know, the disconnect and your thoughts and what the data is showing. Tell us a little about yourself. |
| 1:45.2 | I know that you, you hold a really important position in a really important initiative and do |
| 1:51.1 | really incredible work. So tell us about what you're doing. And then we'll get into like, |
| 1:54.7 | how did you get there? What did God do to move you to where you are now? Yeah. Yeah. So I am first off, a mother to two little boys. |
| 2:05.4 | One just got braces and broke his hand in the same day. What a summer. So we're reeling from that. |
| 2:14.1 | I live out on the west Coast, northwest Washington State. |
... |
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