As global humanitarian director for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Sharon Eubank oversees aid work in 191 countries.

In this episode of “Deseret Voices,” Eubank shares how small things can make a big difference, which she explains in her new book, “Doing Small Things with Great Love: How Everyday Humanitarians Are Changing the World.”

Host Jane Clayson Johnson asks Eubank about the principles of service she’s learned in 28 years of humanitarian work and how we can get involved in our communities.

Subscribe to “Deseret Voices” on YouTube, Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Note: Transcript edited by Steven Watkins

Jane Clayson Johnson: Welcome to the “Deseret Voices” podcast. We’re really glad to have you here. I’m also really excited to welcome Sharon Eubank today. Sharon is the global humanitarian director for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She’s also author of a great new book. It’s called “Doing Small Things with Great Love: How Everyday Humanitarians Are Changing the World.”

There it is. It’s terrific. Sharon, congratulations on the book.

Sharon Eubank: Thank you. So happy to be with you, Jane.

JCJ: It’s great to see you. So you’ve been doing global humanitarian work for 28 years now. Tell us how you got started in this work.

SE: I fully recognize a lot of people aren’t doing the things that they studied, you know. Their career path has gone a different way, but I maybe took a more circuitous route than maybe most people.

I took an English degree and I thought I would be an English teacher. I began teaching English as a second language in Japan, which was a great opportunity for me to really figure out in an international location, you know, some of the barriers that come along with speaking a second language and things like that.

When I left there, I went to Washington, D.C., and I worked for two different senators, and that was a terrific experience for me to see the government in action, see how programs are funded, see how compromise happens, you know, at the committee level. And the government level. When the senator that I worked for retired, I came back to Utah and I started a small business and it was a toy store.

It was the most fun. I still — this time of year when, you know, we would get our Christmas inventory — I miss it. It was a wonderful opportunity.

But the toy store taught me a lot of things. I got to know everybody in my neighborhood and all the kids and my customers. But I also was undercapitalized, and I had to figure out if I don’t have cash, how do I address the issues that I have? And you had to be creative. But there’s, you know, I learned that there’s always a way.

In 1998, I sold the store and I took a job at the church on a six-month contract. I wasn’t going to stay. I was just there for a short amount of time. But the church really invested in me.They sent me a lot of places. They taught me principles. I learned from some of the old, you know, welfare men and women who really got going in the depression when when these principles first came to light and I really fell in love with this kind of work — not just the glamour of, you know, doing humanitarian work around the world — but the change that happens in a person’s heart when the right thing is delivered at the right time in the way that they needed. And there’s something very addictive about that kind of work. And so here I am, 30 years later, best career in the world.

Sharon Eubank, director of Humanitarian Services for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and former first counselor in the general presidency of the Relief Society, poses for a portrait outside of the Church Office Building in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2025. Eubank has a new book called “Doing Small Things with Great Love: How Everyday Humanitarians Are Changing the World.” | Kristin Murphy, Deseret News

JCJ: That’s incredible. So those are the highs. What are the lows? What are the challenges? Because you help oversee millions and millions of dollars in aid money, thousands of volunteers and 191 countries around the world. What makes that hard?

SE: It’s an art and it’s a science. And it’s always hard when there are big problems or small problems that you can’t reach. You know, things that don’t work out, people that refuse to be helped, or there are barriers that you can’t help those people we want to so badly. And our empathy is so high and barriers get in the way. And that breaks my heart. And that’s one of the hardest things.

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JCJ: In this book, you’ve laid out some principles of service that have guided you over these 28 years in this work, in refugee camps, in disaster zones, in war-torn areas. I want to go through some of those principles because the stories you tell in this book are so compelling. I mean, this book is dog-eared. I just really enjoyed it.

I hope people, when they leave this conversation will think, “Oh, I can do that. I heard what Sharon said, and I want to put that principle into action.” So the first one I want to ask you about is “You are most powerful where you live.” Talk about that. What what does that mean exactly?

SE: If you ask just a person, you know, look, tell me about humanitarian work, they will almost always think about giving a physical thing in a faraway location because we’ve seen a lot of that and it becomes our paradigm. But I learned this in a very vivid way when I was responding to the Southeast Asia tsunami.

So if you remember that tsunami, it was a massive wave that covered multiple countries and 300,000 people died. It was just very, very destructive. So it happened on Christmas Day in 2004. This is May of 2005. And I was sent by the church to the country of Sri Lanka, which is an island off the coast of India. It had been devastated by the wave and the project I was working on was to help fishermen get their boats rebuilt so that they could go out and fish. And seamstresses whose machines had been inundated by saltwater, get their machines back so that they could go back to earning a living and supporting their families.

I was working with a man who was from Sri Lanka named Shanta, and we were in a van, and he was driving me from the east part of the country, from the west part of the country, over to the east. And he said, “I want to show you something.” And we stopped and we stopped at a place where the train tracks, the national train, had gone across.

And the people in the area, they looked around and they said, “Oh, the train will be high. It’s sitting up on a built-up track. It’s a very heavy train.” So the people in the train lowered the windows down and people on the ground lifted up babies and toddlers that might be bowled over by the water when it came because they really felt that would be the safest place for them. When the wave hit that train broadside, it just tumbled it and they were all hooked together, those cars. And so they just crunched and crumbled and 1,500 people died in that train, so sad. And many, many of those children. And so when I arrived and Shanta brought me there five months later, all these people who camped around the train and I said to him, “Why are they here?”

And he said, “because it was the last place they were together as a family.” This is, you know, this remembering the people that they had lost. And so we got out of the car and they said the English words that they know: “I lost my husband.” “I lost my baby.” “Can you help me?” And I remember thinking, I don’t have anything in my pockets. We don’t have anything in the car. I couldn’t give anything to them, and I was a little bit traumatized, just by seeing their trauma. And I stood there kind of mute in the dirt. But I watched Shanta go over to the van, he opens up the back and he gets a soccer ball out, and he pumps it up and he starts kicking it around.

And of course, kids come pouring out from everywhere and they start showing off their little tricks. And he’s doing his tricks. And while he’s kicking it around, a woman says, “Hey, that yeast that you got me, I’m making bread and you should try some.” She brings him a piece of bread, which he tastes, and another woman said, “I don’t have any washing powder. Can you help us get some?” And he said, “I think I know where some is. I’ll bring you some next time.” And as I watched that, it dawned on me that knowledge of, oh, Shanta is more powerful in this situation than I am. It doesn’t matter that we’re we’re doing these projects or building these houses. That doesn’t mean anything to the people who are there.

What’s meaningful to them is that Shanta comes there regularly and he’s invested in their kids, and he’s willing to help them find yeast or washing powder. And he speaks their language and he understands their culture and he’s there every day. And that was a revelation to me. I didn’t know that before. And yet over the years, it has just proved to be true, because we do speak the language, because we do understand the cultural tensions and problems.

We are most valuable and most powerful in the places where we live. And we’re there all the time. And as unintuitive as that seems, it’s one of the greatest truths that I thought I could put in the book. Don’t need to feel like you have to go somewhere. You have so many opportunities right where you live.

JCJ: This fits in nicely, actually, to your next principle, which I found so interesting, which is “Find local solutions to local problems.” So share a story where a local solution, was better than anything an outsider could have designed or brought in to fix the problem.

SE: I created a beautiful water project and of course it has a pump because you need some pressure. So we built a stand. We put the tank up there, but rather than have a generator push the water up into that tank, which takes gasoline and it’s really noisy. We thought we’re going to be environmental.

Let’s put solar panels on this. So we have this great technology. We put solar panels. It’s in Kenya. It’s a very sunny place and we congratulated ourselves. Well done. And two weeks later, after this community had just started getting used to having this, this water, a hailstorm came along, and it broke out all the solar panels.

So the man who’s in charge of the water committee, he called us, and he said, “How do we repair the solar panels?” And we thought, “They came from Germany. You’re going to have to figure out how to order them and get them shipped from Germany and get them through customs in Kenya.” And he says, “Never mind. It’s never going to happen.”

So we thought we’d come up with this great opportunity, but in the end, they couldn’t repair it. They couldn’t repair it locally. And so it became something broken. And the world is filled with broken machinery that’s out back of that hospital or out back of that municipal building because it’s missing a part or a gasket or a little piece and it’s not repairable locally.

And if I could just say one thing, it is this idea that it doesn’t matter how great the solution is, if it cannot be fixed locally, it’s not going to work. And it even hurts because they get used to the water for two weeks. Isn’t this the best thing that ever happened? And then it’s taken away. And so their hopes get dashed.

And I think that’s a difficult part of that.

Sharon Eubank, director of Latter-day Saint Charities for the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, talks with Abena Amedormey, the Ghana country director for Catholic Relief Services, after a panel discussion with church leaders and representatives from humanitarian organizations about the church's global initiative to improve the well-being of women and children, at the Relief Society Building in Salt Lake City on Thursday, June 5, 2025. | Brice Tucker, Deseret News

JCJ: How do I find a local solution to a local problem that’s vexing, that’s been, you know, causing issues in my community for a long time. How do I go about doing that? What’s the process of that?

SE: There’s an idea that we sometimes talk about in the church that inspiration or revelation is scattered among us. I think it’s one of the reasons that we we have councils together, we try and work together. But I believe the adage that the solution is inside the people, it’s not in the technology, it’s not in a corporation. It’s not coming from somewhere.

For this problem, the solution is going to be it’s going to be inside of us. So I’m going to ask you, what’s an issue that you’re worried about in your community and where you are? What are you worried about?

JCJ: You know, I think there are a lot of people in our community who wonder about what their kids are doing after school and where they’re going, and how we can better care for them, give them spaces to congregate and do something productive after school. That’s one thing.

SE: All right. So you’re a member of the community. You might be a mom and you’re worried about what kids are doing after school. And is it safe and could we do something productive? That’s a legitimate issue that leads to a lot of other issues that cause trouble along the line. But if you sit down with other parents, other moms and dads, other people in the community who care and just say, what would change this issue?

If you’re worried about it and I’m worried about it, what would we do differently? And sometimes we’re looking for an agency or somebody that’s somebody to do it. But I think there’s a lot of power just in us having this discussion. And you might say, we need something. Let’s take that open space that’s nobody’s using over there.

And let’s do something for kids after school while they wait for people to come home from work or something. You’ll come up with an idea, you’ll organize around yourselves, you’ll get a little bit of funding resource and you’ll do something. And of course, it’s great for the kids after school that addresses that issue. But even more importantly, the people who are doing it — we got bonded to each other. Now I know Jane and you know me, and I know your kids, and we’ve worked together. We’ve built a little bit of trust. That is the real alchemy that happens in the community. We need way more of that. And you don’t need outside agencies as much as you need energetic people to say, what can we do?

Let’s do it. What did we learn?

JCJ: Let’s work together. Yeah. Another principle, from your book, “My solution to your problem will always be wrong.” My solution to your problem will always be wrong. Is there a moment you learned this principle the hard way?

SE: I get to tell you about a wonderful friend of mine. His name is Patrick Reese. So when I was, appointed to be the director of Humanitarian Services, I was pretty young. I was not the obvious choice. And I’m sure Patrick, who had worked for the church for 37 years, was like, why did they choose her?

But instead of, you know, crabbing at me, he was — he worked in my in my department — he would sit with me every morning and we would talk about what was happening during the day: who was coming in, what decisions had to be made, what kinds of things were were on the front burner. And then I would say to him in my inexperience, “What should I do, Patrick??

And he would say his mantra, “My solution to your problem will always be wrong.” And I would say, “It’s not going to be wrong. Patrick. You have experience, I need your help.” And usually when someone says that to you, that was, well, OK, I’ll tell you what I think you should do. Patrick refused to do that. He would say, “What do you think you should do?”

And I’d say, “Well, I guess, I think I should do that.” And he’d say, “If you do that and this other thing happens, how will you mitigate for that thing?” “Oh, I hadn’t thought about that. Oh, I guess I would do this.” “All right. If we do that and we make this decision and it turns out to be wrong, then what will we do?”

He would walk me through a decision tree about all of that. And when I got down to the decision that I made and I felt confident about it, I could go forward. He gave me the confidence to be a new leader because he didn’t tell me what to do. And I’ve since believed that for people who have been in a disaster, for people who are in trouble, for our kids that are struggling, they don’t want us to tell them what to do.

They want us to trust that the answers inside them and say that my solution to your problem will always be wrong, but I’ll help you find your own answer and I’ll help you implement it. And if it’s wrong, I’ll help you fix it. That’s the kind of relationship that blessed me as a new leader, and I think it blesses a lot of people in a lot of different situations.

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JCJ: Some other principles. Spend energy attacking root causes. I want to go through a couple of these because there’s one I want to ask you about. “Real help is always an exchange. No act of service,” you write, “should flow one way from giver to receiver. It always should be a two-way street in some way.” One principle I really liked: “Protect dignity.”

You write, “It isn’t always possible to credibly help another person if the help begins on the premise that I’m rich or I’m educated or I’m powerful, or I have the help and I’m coming in because you are poor or you are disadvantaged or you are in crisis. True help is an exchange,” which I just love. Can you talk more about that Sharon?

SE: A woman told me a story. She was from southern Idaho, and she had become a church volunteer and gone to India. And when she was in India, she was overwhelmed by the level of poverty that she had never seen. And she wrote back to her family about how crowded the living conditions were, how many people lived in small quarters, dirt floors full of smells that were just overwhelming to her, and she kept writing back.

She said, “It’s so sad. They have nothing. They just have nothing.” And she said, “I wrote that phrase so many times.” And about three months into her experience, she was sitting at church and an Indian woman came up and sat next to her and she said, “We feel really sorry for you. Is there anything we can do to help you?”

And the woman from Idaho was like, “You feel sorry for me?” You know, “Why?” She said, “I saw that photo that you showed about your family, your house, and it was empty. You don’t have your parents living with you. You don’t have your children living with you. And it must be so sad to be by yourself.” And, she said, “You don’t you don’t have anyone to cook for and be with. So we want to be your Indian family. If you’ll come to our house, we’re going to cook with you. We’re going to teach you our recipes. We will be your Indian sisters if you’ll let us.”

And she sat there and thought, “I’ve been feeling sorry for them. They’ve been feeling sorry for me. And the very reasons that I thought that they were poor. They think that they’re rich, that their family and the closeness of their family and the the joy of sitting around the table and talking and eating recipes, that’s their wealth.” And they wanted to share it with her. And she said, “I will never, ever say again people have nothing because everyone have things to share. And I thought I was coming to, you know, share my, my great wealth with them. And it turns out in the end they shared their wealth with me. They were my family.”

And that story, that example is true in many, many different instances. We all have poverty, we all have wealth. And if we discount that somebody has nothing, we pretty much say, “You have no value.” Why would you ever say that to someone?

So instead we can say, “I have different wealth than you, and I want to learn from you, and I hope that you can learn from me.” That’s the exchange that provides dignity and I guess it provides the reality of we’re all children of God, and we all come with blessings, and we all come with difficulties. And this is why we’re here to help each other. It’s an acknowledgment of that reality.

JCJ: Is there one principle that has guided you that you thought you’d mastered, only to be humbled by it later.

SE: We always think that the first thing that has to happen when you’re trying to help in a certain situation is to gather money, because you’re going to need resource and you’re, it’s true, you’re going to need resource. But the premier skill is to ask somebody what they want, ask them what they need, sit down and ask them, what’s going on? What have you tried already? What happened when you tried that? What do you want? What do you wish people would bring to you? If they brought to you that, What would you do? That’s so easy to know intellectually, but it’s so hard to practice because deep in our hearts, we really do feel like I probably know what is best in the situation.

And we forget to ask people, what kind of help do you want from me? And I have, I’ve known that for 20 years, but I have missed it as early as last week. You just, you just forget to do that.

Sharon Eubank, the director of Latter-day Saint Charities for the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, answers a question during a panel discussion with church leaders and representatives from humanitarian organizations about the church's global initiative to improve the well-being of women and children, at the Relief Society Building in Salt Lake City on Thursday, June 5, 2025. | Brice Tucker, Deseret News

JCJ: It takes a lot to cultivate that mindset of kind of being there and listening rather than going in and trying to fix things, right? Sometimes it’s just a matter of creating a relationship that can be long-lasting, where listening is the currency of the relationship.

SE: There was a death in my family a couple of weeks ago, and I’m just — I was trying to help the siblings of the person who died — and they’re so broken up and it’s so hard. And, you know, I was suggesting, you know, we could do this. We could do that. And, how about if I bring this next week? And one of them said to me, he said, “I just want you to sit next to me. I don’t want you to talk. I just want you to sit next to me.”

JCJ: Yes.

SE: And I realized, I’m doing that thing again. You know, I’m assuming what they need without ever asking, what do you need? And how can I help you? And then just sit there and don’t do anything.

JCJ: Yeah, yeah. You emphasize in your book, “Use your existing interests and talents to find ways to serve. If you love sports, if you love art or gardening, take what you really care about and look for ways to expand that circle.” Talk more about that. How do I do that? The person who’s listening and who wants to serve in better, more meaningful ways. How do they start?

SE: So you and I both know my father. My father was a weatherman in Salt Lake City. He’s loved weather since he was a kid. Ten years old, 9 years old. He’s writing a column in the Los Angeles Burbank paper. His parents always told him, we know you love weather, but you’ve got to find something else to do, and you can’t make a living out of weather.

But lo and behold, he figured out a way to make a living out of weather. And probably because I’m his child, I recognize that those intense passions that we have. And they’re about all kinds of different things. They’re about coins or they’re about sports or they’re it’s a team. Or in his case, it’s weather it’s a gift. It’s a spiritual gift that’s been given to us because we’re inclined that way.

And when we follow the energy that’s inside of us, out into the community, I think it attracts other people who have that kind of energy. And it also opens opportunities and pathways. So in the same way that, you know, nobody thought my dad could make a living out of his interest in weather, but he found a way to do that. He had a 40-year career of being a weatherman on television.

JCJ: One of the best.

SE: He was the weatherman for the Olympics when they came to Salt Lake. These great, wonderful things because he followed his passion and he attracted other people to it. And so whatever I think your passion is people are attracted to that energy. They want to be around you.

And that very fact opens up opportunities that wouldn’t be there otherwise. So I hope that people don’t discount that of, “Oh, there’s nothing I can do just because I love the Cleveland Cavaliers.” You know, whatever the thing is, use that interest that you have to attract other people and then turn it outward. Turn outward and be able to say, since we all love the Cleveland Cavaliers, what can we do in this community?

How can we help kids that like basketball? Or what can we do for the rising generation? And use the energy to bless other people? And there’s always a path.

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JCJ: And what advice do you give families, individuals to cultivate a service instinct, a service mindset, integrate it into their regular lives, into their jobs, into their family, into their neighborhoods, instead of seeing it sort of as an external obligation or something I do on Saturday or whatever it is. Like, cultivating that at making just really part of who you are?

SE: That’s a very insightful question, because sometimes we think that I will save up a lot of money and I will go a certain place and I will do my humanitarian work. As if it isn’t really just a lifestyle, choices, a way of being. I think if you’re a student of the New Testament, Jesus was trying very hard to get people to say, “I love God and I love my neighbor and the way that you know that? By love.”

And so the ability to quit worrying as much about ourselves and start thinking about neighbors, Samaritans, you know, people who are of different political mindsets or that worship differently or look differently, and trying to build a bridge for them. And if I can do that as I go along my business every single day, think of myself as a bridge-builder.

And if I can take kids with me and let them see that example, when they’re 4, 5, 10, 15, they see the pattern about how to do it, and it makes it much easier for them to become a lifestyle rather than a destination.

JCJ: I want to ask you, Sharon, in the past year we’ve seen the U.S. government move to withdraw billions of dollars in international aid programs. Cuts that impact global health, humanitarian programs. I’m curious, first, your thoughts on that and the ripple effect of that.

SE: It’s a truth that a lot of people don’t know. There aren’t very many pots of money to do humanitarian work. The United Nations has some funding and governments have a lot of funding. The U.N., the United States, through USAID, funded a lot of work around the world on behalf of the citizens of the United States. And no doubt that work is messy and could be refined. But it was changed in a very quick way. And because it happened in such a quick way, a lot of people lost jobs. A lot of work was stopped immediately. People didn’t have time to prepare. So there’s been a lot of repercussions that people didn’t get to look for and sort of plan for. And so that’s made it particularly hard.

I don’t think that anyone doesn’t think there could have been refinements, but now that that source of money has been withdrawn, there is a real reckoning of what are the most important things. We can’t fund everything, so we have to fund life-saving things. What are the most important things? And there is a changing or a turning, whether it’s the right thing or not, to faith-based organizations.

And it’s one of the unique things about my organization is, we don’t take government funding. We are self-funded by the small and large donations from members of the church. But that allows us to be independent. Because that funding has been withdrawn and others are reassessing their priorities, there is an increased look toward faith groups. Of what can faith groups do?

And so I really feel like this might be the time for us to really say, we’re going to live our beliefs and we’re going to try and take care of other people, and we’re going to do it by principles. That this money isn’t given to advance the cause of a nation; it’s given to advance the cause of we’re all brothers and sisters on this planet. And there is purpose in us building bridges among us, even though we’re very different. And I think faith’s giving that message is a really powerful opportunity. So I think this is our window. This is our time.

General Relief Society President Jean B. Bingham, right, and Sharon Eubank try local fruits picked by refugee women at Imvepi Refugee Settlement in Arua district of Uganda on Feb. 28, 2017. | The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

JCJ: What’s the biggest shift that’s needed in secular organizations or faith-based community organizations as an approach to service moving forward?

SE: I’ll say two different things. One of them is, a lot of duplication happens. And it’s because, you know, lots of different aid groups are working and they have their priorities. But a lot of duplication happens. If we can take that and tip it, so that we could say, rather than all of us doing the same things, let’s each of us do what we’re good at and we’ll cooperate with each other and work together. Because of the constraint now, the money constraint, there’s some motivation for us to actually cooperate and do this. And I think it would bring more power to the work that we’re trying to do.

The other thing I would say is there’s always three things you can give in humanitarian work. You can give cash, you can give goods and commodities.

But the most powerful thing you can give is a relationship with another person. We call it volunteerism. But the ability to connect people who you can trust to work together is the most important thing you can give. The greatest poverty is when you have no one to trust. And the greatest wealth is when you have someone you trust who’s helping you.

And so I think in this instance, of course, we can give cash, we can give commodities. But if we would get engaged in our own communities, pick a cause and spend just a little bit of extra time doing that of ourselves, our talents, our interests, our passions, it would change the face of our society if we just get engaged a little bit more.

And that’s the opportunity.

JCJ: All right, so the person who just heard that, you say, Sharon Eubanks says, “Pick a cause, get engaged.” Tell me how I do that. Give me some actual practical tips to take away from this conversation where I can go do something good for someone else.

SE: I was at a book group just a couple days ago, and one of the women said, she belongs to a giving circle. And I said, “Wow, you must be you must be wealthy.” And she said, “Oh, no. We each commit to give $100 every quarter.” So every year they’ve committed to give $400. And for some people that’s a lot of money.

But for this woman, she said, there’s 100 of us. We call each other — I think they call each other the 100 women in Cache Valley who care — and they invite agencies to come and give a proposal. They’d listen to three every quarter. And then collectively, the 100 women take their $100 and they donate to the three causes that they have heard from, and then they receive follow-ups.

And she said, “We’ve learned about things in Cache Valley that we had no idea about, and we feel powerful and good because we’re advancing a cause. And it’s not just my $100, it’s all the other $100 in the giving group.” And so it was really great. And of course, anybody could start a group like that.

JCJ: I love that so much, I love that.

So if people don’t know where to start, what do you say?

SE: I want to make sure that I give a little notice for the app and the website called JustServe. It’s sponsored by the church, but it’s free. Anybody can use it. And it’s designed so that you can put in your zip code. And up will come all kinds of projects just around you of things that you can do.

And if you look at that and you think, “Oh, I wish there were more projects in my area,” then please start a project and post it on JustServe and invite other people to do what you were doing. The thing I like about JustServe is — my friend John Hewko, who’s the head of Rotary International, he said, “We need to wage peace as aggressively as nations wage war.”

And that’s pretty relevant right now as we look at some of the devastation from the wars. And the way to wage peace is through volunteerism and getting involved, like we’ve talked about. And if you don’t know where to start, JustServe is a great place. It’s free. Nobody’s going to proselytize you. Nobody’s going to monetize your information. It’s a platform that’s designed to bring communities together and that’s the only reason it exists. So if you don’t know where to start, there’s a good place.

JCJ: JustServe?

SE: Justserve.org.

JCJ: What’s your favorite way to serve, Sharon?

SE: I always give this answer and maybe people are tired of it, but if you don’t know what to do, this has worked for me in so many locations. Go to the principal of the junior high or to the town council and sit down with them and say, tell me about the school. Tell me about what you’re interested in, what you’re worried about.

What do you want people in this neighborhood to do for the school? And you will walk out of there with five things to do. People will go to the elementary school. They often go to the high school. Nobody goes to the junior high. So sit down with that principal.

JCJ: Oh, I love it, love it. What is your favorite principle? I’ve asked you about a few. A few that stuck out to me, “Doing small things with great love.” What is your favorite principle in the book? Sharon Eubank.

SE: My favorite principal is the one I used for the title. It comes from a quote from Mother Teresa. And she says, we can’t all do great things, but we can all do small things with great love. And I think about her in her ministry. She’s in India. She’s working with people who are dying in their very last days.

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And she does very ordinary things with them. She washes them, she tucks them into clean sheets. She writes their last letters. She holds their hand so that they’re not alone. And you think, you know, those are very small, ordinary things. But she was doing it with great love. And what I like about the principal is it isn’t the thing that you’re doing.

That’s not the emphasis, the emphasis on the way that you’re doing it, the approach, the attitude. If you can do it with grace and love and non-judgment and desire to lift that person up, that’s the art. And that’s why I made it the title of the book. We can all do small things, but we can do them with magnificent love. And that’s what has the power to change.

JCJ: I’m really inspired. I really, really appreciate you coming on and talking with us today. There’s so much we can all do and we’ve learned a lot from you today. Thank you so much, Sharon.

SE:My pleasure. Thank you for having me on the show.

Sharon Eubank, director of Humanitarian Services for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and former first counselor in the general presidency of the Relief Society, poses for a portrait outside of the Church Office Building in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, Oct. 29, 2025. Eubank has a new book called “Doing Small Things with Great Love: How Everyday Humanitarians Are Changing the World.” | Kristin Murphy, Deseret News
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