Years before she embarked on her decadeslong humanitarian career, Sharon Eubank watched her mother knitting pairs of slippers to send to war-torn Sarajevo and asked herself a question that she now says she’s “embarrassed” by: “Is that the best we can do?”
At the time, Bosnia was engulfed in conflict that led to genocide and nearly 2 million people being displaced — a crisis on a massive scale. And Eubank wasn’t sure how, in her words, “homemade slippers from a woman in Utah” were going to help.
Five years later, however, Eubank read an account in The New York Times of a woman living in Sarajevo in a bombed-out, freezing cold building, who was overjoyed to receive a gift — a new pair of socks.
“I felt like I had been living as an animal,” Eubank recalled the woman saying in the article. “And putting my filthy, frozen feet into these socks somehow made me feel like I was human again, that somebody had acknowledged, you’re a human being that needs help.”
Looking back at her mother’s knitted slippers now, Eubank has had a change of perspective. In her opinion, asking whether a gesture of help is “big enough” is the wrong way of looking at things.
“I recognized it isn’t whether socks or slippers are big enough — it’s that it was the right thing, the thing that she needed at the right time, delivered in the right way,” Eubank told the Deseret News.
That idea is what has driven Eubank’s mentality throughout her 28-year career in humanitarian work — and it’s also what has led her to write a new book, “Doing Small Things with Great Love: How Everyday Humanitarians Are Changing the World,” which was published in September by Shadow Mountain Publishing.
As the head of the humanitarian arm of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Eubank knows how important it is to give aid and help others on a large scale. But she’s also seen the impact of “small things” — like a pair of new socks for a woman in Sarajevo — and the difference it can make in the lives of both those who give and those who receive.
Creating a practical guide for humanitarian work
Eubank didn’t set out to write a book. But after nearly three decades of experience in humanitarian work, people had questions for her about what they could do to help others — and she had some answers.
“Over the 28 years that I had been doing this work, I had, number one, met a lot of people who are terrific, who taught me by experience,” Eubank said. “And then I also made a lot of mistakes over that time, and I was hoping that people wouldn’t have to make the same mistakes that I had made.”
With that in mind, she wanted to write a practical guide — based on principles as well as personal experiences — that would-be humanitarians could use as a starting point. She noted that many books on the topic of humanitarian or volunteer work tend to be “academic or high-minded,” but she wanted to create something different.
“I think for most people who are just living their regular lives, and they have a little bit of time or a little bit of money, they need to know, ‘Tell me what to do with my hands,’” she said. “And so that was the bent that I took on the book.”
Eubank drew the title of the book from a quote commonly attributed to Mother Teresa: “Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.” Throughout the book, she highlights 12 principles that she believes should guide humanitarian work — ranging from “You are most powerful where you live” to “Protect dignity, protect choice” to “It’s meant to be fun.”
Eubank has plenty of her own practical experience to back up her advice. She’s been the director of Humanitarian Services for the Church of Jesus Christ since 2011, and also spent several years as first counselor in the church’s Relief Society general presidency. In those capacities, she’s traveled the world and led a number of global programs, including the church’s wheelchair initiative, and, more recently, oversees JustServe and the Perpetual Education Fund.
Her career didn’t begin in humanitarian work, though. Eubank, who grew up in Bountiful, Utah, as the oldest of seven siblings (her father, Mark Eubank, was a longtime meteorologist for KSL), studied English and history at BYU. After graduating, her experience ranged from teaching English in Japan to working as a legislative aide for two U.S. senators to owning her own small business.
But Eubank believes that this breadth of experience has helped her.
“In some ways, you think, ‘Oh, I didn’t prepare,’” Eubank said of her career background. “But in a lot of other ways, the variety, the background that I gained from things that I did before I began working in humanitarian services have been a real help for me.”
And although her past roles seemed “unrelated” to each other, Eubank notes in her book that at each step of her career, she found herself drawn to similar questions.
“Can I as an individual make a real difference, or is it up to governments, organizations and foundations to do the real work?”
“Do small acts of compassion and connection have power to change situations for the better?”
“How can I help?”
Individuals can make a difference — even amid tragedy
Through the years, Eubank has seen over and over again how individuals and “small acts” can make a big difference. And she saw it happen up close earlier this year, in the aftermath of a tragedy — not in her work, but in her personal life.
Eubank is close to the family of Ava Ahlander, a 23-year-old woman who was killed last month in an accident at the Redwest Music Festival in Salt Lake City.
“I watched her siblings, I watched her parents and her extended family deal with such a shock and such grief,” Eubank said. “And I saw the kind things that people did for them that made a difference.”
“We can certainly do what we need to do in the month of November and December to take care of everybody in our neighborhoods. ... Let’s try to help each other not suffer.”
— Sharon Eubank
As people reached out to the family to share memories and photographs, and to bring food to the family during such a difficult time, Eubank said she was able to observe the difference that those small acts made for that family.
It was also a reminder to her to have empathy for others — because you never know what the people around you may be going through.
“Any given time, as you walk down the street, there are people who, at that moment, are going through something like that,” she said. “You don’t see it outside, but internally, their whole world has just exploded. ... It sounds like a cliche, but give each other the grace to say, ‘I don’t understand everything that’s going on in your world.’”
Another reminder came during the recent government shutdown, which lasted a record-long 43 days and — before it ended on Nov. 12 — led to millions of Americans going without paychecks and aid from programs like SNAP. Though the shutdown was a large-scale problem that ultimately had to be resolved by Congress, there were still ways for individuals to step up and help.
“All of us, you know, just regular citizens, we may not have a huge effect on Washington right now,” Eubank said. “But we can certainly do what we need to do in the month of November and December to take care of everybody in our neighborhoods. And I hope that we’ll reach out. ... Let’s try to help each other not suffer.”
Red velvet cake and ‘the real spirit of Christmas’
For Eubank, the act of giving or helping others doesn’t just benefit the person who receives that help — it benefits the giver as well. Because of this, she says that the idea of “giving” ought to be seen as a “reciprocal relationship.”
It can be easy to fall into the trap of thinking, “I have been fortunate, so I will help people who are less fortunate,” Eubank said. “But I think when we categorize people in that hierarchical kind of way, I think it discounts the richness that every person is born in.”
“It’s maybe comfortable to think that ‘I am educated, I am rich, I am helpful, and I will help you,’ but the disparity between our relationships sort of gets in the way of us really having a reciprocal relationship. And I’m always looking for ways to break those barriers down.”
One way of doing that is to recognize that every person has “riches” or “poverties,” Eubank says — and that there’s something that we can all gain from each other.
Eubank learned this lesson years ago from a woman who was frequently panhandling in the street outside of her office building in Salt Lake City.
At first, “she scared me to death,” Eubank said, so whenever she needed to leave the building, she would try to leave through different doors in an attempt to avoid her. So she was surprised when she left her office one day with one of her colleagues, who greeted the panhandling woman by name and said, “Marilyn, it’s so nice to see you.”
Eubank realized that her colleague, Elizabeth, had met Marilyn in the same way that she had, by encountering her in the street. But instead, Elizabeth had developed a “real relationship” with Marilyn, Eubank said. They had talked to each other about their families, and Elizabeth had even brought her husband and children to meet Marilyn at Christmastime.
During that Christmas meeting, it turned out that Marilyn had a gift for Elizabeth’s family — a piece of red velvet cake that she had saved in a Styrofoam container for them.
Learning all of this made Eubank realize that Marilyn “had riches that I didn’t know anything about,” she said.
“(Marilyn) wanted to be a giver. She wanted to give a Christmas present — and how respectful it is to accept her piece of red velvet cake and to thank her for it, and to be touched by that, the real spirit of Christmas.”
Finding common ground in volunteering and the golden rule
Apart from the benefits to individuals, Eubank believes that it affects society as a whole when people volunteer their time to help others. She sees volunteerism as a “civilizing, unifying principle in our community.”
“We might vote differently, we might worship differently,” but volunteering for a common cause can help people find something neutral to agree on. And that can help create new relationships — as well as strengthen existing ones.
Eubank said that she takes longtime Utah advocate Pamela Atkinson as her example when it comes to engaging with people with whom she disagrees.
“She always says, ‘I can disagree with you 75% of the time, but I still like you,’” Eubank said. “You know, ‘We’re still friends.’ And she doesn’t put the friendship on the line, and we don’t have to agree on everything to still keep our relationships.
“But that only works ... if you have a strong enough relationship with each other outside of politics, or the faith, or whatever that thing is. And so for me, volunteerism is the mechanism that allows (us) to do something in the society together.”
In her book, Eubank discusses the principle of the golden rule — a fundamental Christian belief taught in the Bible. But as she researched for her book, Eubank said that she realized that the principle was far from exclusive to Christianity.
“It exists in every faith, culture that I could come across,” she said. “It exists separate from history, from tribal affiliations, from politics, from faith.”
Eubank includes a lengthy list of quotes in the book, each of them from different cultures and faiths — from Buddhism to Islam to the Yoruba people of West Africa — that all share the same basic idea of the golden rule. As for Eubank, she describes the principle this way: “Do unto others what you would want them to do to you, and don’t do unto other people what you don’t want done unto you.”
To Eubank, that principle is another way of finding common ground with others who may be different from you. And while the golden rule exists in such a wide variety of cultures, for her, it is grounded in her own faith — in believing that “we’re all children of God ... we are all part of a human family with divine origins and divine purpose.”
The other side of that coin, she believes, is that each person in the world possesses “fundamental human rights.”
“You have these human rights by virtue of being human,” Eubank said. “They may be protected, they may be unprotected, but they still accrue to you as human beings, and the best governments, the best forces in our society, will protect those rights for every human being.”
Remembering that all people have human rights influences every aspect of her life and work, she said. “That motivates me as a human being, as a person, as a humanitarian, as a family member. I want my rights to be respected, and I want to ensure that other people have their rights.”
Although it’s the responsibility of governments and nations to protect human rights, Eubank believes individuals need to remember that they have influence, too. She said it’s important to consider, “‘What is my moral responsibility as an individual to stand up for people whose rights are being disrespected?’ Because it’s much more powerful when somebody from a group that isn’t being affected stands up for the rights of people who are being affected.”
As an example, she pointed to the experiences of early members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who experienced prejudice and persecution in the years after the church was founded.
“We had non-Latter-day Saints stand up for our rights when we were being persecuted,” Eubank said, “and that’s still meaningful to us 200 years later.”
Finding where to get started
When Eubank was around 8 or 9 years old, her parents sat her down with her siblings to tell them that they had bought a piece of land and they were going to build a house on it. But they didn’t have the money yet to build the house, her parents said, and they needed the help of Eubank and her siblings to save money. They said the children could help in small ways, like turning out the lights to save on electricity costs.
“It isn’t that we focus on, ‘Am I doing a big thing or a small thing?’ That doesn’t matter as much as the way that we’re doing it.”
— Sharon Eubank
Because her parents had asked for her help, Eubank said she felt “very accountable” and did her best to help out — she turned out the lights in the house whenever she could, even if people were still sitting in the room.
“I probably contributed 6 cents to my parents’ house, the savings of the electricity,” Eubank said. “But I felt like it was my individual responsibility.”
She likened this feeling to a quote by former President Jimmy Carter, who said that “the common good is our common interest and our individual responsibility.”
The more that each individual person contributes and takes accountability for helping their state, their community, their school or their neighborhood thrive, “even if we’re just giving our 6 cents, the more we can achieve what this country was built on,” she said. “It was based on principles of democracy, where everybody contributes to the common good.”
Still, even for those who want to contribute, it can sometimes be difficult to know where to begin. That’s why, in Eubank’s book, she included a list of 50 “prompts to get started” — some of them as simple as “introduce yourself to a neighbor you don’t know.”
But Eubank had a particular invitation for Deseret News readers — one that she said she intended to try herself with members of her own family.
“Sit down with someone who’s under 20 years old and ask them to give you a playlist of their top five songs,” she said. Then, ask them a couple of questions: “Tell me why you like those songs. What is it about this music that engages with you?”
The idea behind the exercise, according to Eubank, is to “engage with a young person in a way that doesn’t make them feel uncomfortable” and to see what you can learn “about them and their view of the world and their dreams and their hopes and what they’d like to do, and maybe there’s something (you) could do together.”
It’s a small action to start with — but, as Eubank notes in the title of her book, it’s not the size of the action that matters.
“It isn’t that we focus on, ‘Am I doing a big thing or a small thing?’” Eubank said. “That doesn’t matter as much as the way that we’re doing it. We’re doing it with empathy, with respect, with dignity — in Mother Teresa’s words, great love. That is the thing we should focus on the very most.”