CNN Opinion columnist, John D. Sutter, recently featured Lake Providence, La., in his Change the List project. His first article and video exposes the vast income inequality in the Lake Providence area, while the second article highlights members of the community who are helping to bridge the gap, including Jenny Hodge, leader of CBF’s Together for Hope initiative in Lake Providence.

UPDATE: Sutter posted a follow-up to his original articles with ways to help Lake Providence, including Together for Hope. Click here to check it out! Hodge also requests prayers for this conversation to be a catalyst for positive community engagement.

Sutter says this of Hodge:

7. Jenny Hodge, the backpack missionary

Jenny Hodge, a Baptist missionary employed by a group called Together for Hope, is working to give poorer residents of Lake Providence a voice in their community and to meet some basic needs. She organized a backpack drive this year, for example, to make sure all of the public school kids had the supplies they would need.

She says people are quick to blame poorer individuals for their circumstances, to think that they can just try harder and all of a sudden problems will vanish.

“You have to look at a more systematic view of it,” she said. “It’s not because folks in Lake Providence are lazy or they don’t want to work.

“I think people underestimate how hard it is to live on or below or just above the poverty line,” she said. One recent study published in the journal Science showed that the stress of being poor reduces a person’s available IQ by the equivalent of 13 points. A brain taxed with the stress of poverty — wondering how to pay the bills each month or trying to find a job that might not exist — can’t function at its highest level. That reduction in IQ is “comparable to the cognitive difference that’s been observed between chronic alcoholics and normal adults,” writes Emily Badger in The Atlantic.

“Power is not just the ability to do it, it’s the ability to think you could do it,” Hodge said. “To believe that it actually can happen.”

She’s one of the people helping Lake Providence believe again.

Launched in 2001, Together for Hope (TFH) is a long-term commitment to working with people in 20 of the nation’s poorest counties in order to affect change and break the cycle of economic disparity. The ministry is about establishing long-term relationships, listening, learning and walking alongside local leaders. The hope is that communities will be transformed as will the churches and individuals who serve in focal counties.

The work of Together for Hope closely relates to the CBF Poverty and Transformation Mission Community. Did you know that 1.2 million people globally live on $1 a day or less? The Poverty and Transformation Mission Community facilitates clean water projects, cares for children in poverty-stricken communities and alleviates hunger.

Sutter’s Change the List program sets out to expose the county/parish with the highest rate of income inequality, which is the East Carroll Parish in Lake Providence, where he found Together for Hope already hard at work.