Two customers, one mission

By: Tom Wilson, NCF North Texas Director of Community Engagement

Peter Drucker, the great management thinker, believed every organization must be able to answer three questions: What is your business? Who is your customer? What does your customer value? For most organizations, those questions are straightforward. For the National Christian Foundation, they are not — because NCF has two customers, and serving both well is the very heart of what we do.

Our first customer is the fund holder — the generous man or woman who has opened a donor advised fund to bring intention, strategy, and faith to their giving. Our second customer is the ministry or organization that fund holders choose to support. What both customers value, at the deepest level, is the same thing: the confidence that generosity is being translated into genuine, lasting transformation.

I was reminded of this recently in a powerful way.

As Director of Community Engagement, I have the privilege of seeing where NCF fund holders direct their giving. I noticed that several of our most thoughtful, discerning fund holders — people who pray carefully over every gift — had made significant donations to a ministry called Men of Nehemiah. Curious, I reached out to an NCF board member who was himself a funder. Without hesitation, he offered to take me to meet the founder, Louis Harrell Jr., and tour the facility.

What I found there stayed with me.

Men of Nehemiah exists to rebuild the lives of men whose worlds have been shattered by drug and alcohol addiction. Its name is drawn from the Old Testament leader who looked at broken walls and refused to accept that rubble was the final word. That same conviction runs through everything the ministry does. Men arrive broken. They leave restored — to themselves, to their families, and to their communities.

The program is nine months long. In a culture addicted to quick fixes, that commitment to depth is itself a statement of faith. And the results bear it out: Men of Nehemiah reports an 85 percent success rate — a figure that would be extraordinary in any sector, and is remarkable in addiction recovery.

Louis Harrell Jr. and Executive Director Melinda Russ have built something that cannot be explained by programming or policy alone. There is a quality of Christian leadership at Men of Nehemiah — a servant-heartedness, a deep love of the Lord, a fierce and tender passion for the men in their care — that fills every room of that facility. My wife joined me the following week for a worship service, and we both left moved in ways that are difficult to articulate and impossible to forget.

Which brings me back to Peter Drucker.

What do NCF fund holders value? They value knowing that their generosity is being stewarded by people of integrity, deployed through organizations of excellence, and producing fruit that lasts. They are not writing checks into the void. They are investing in transformation — and they need partners who help them find, vet, and support ministries that are truly doing the work.

What do ministries like Men of Nehemiah value? They value the kind of committed, mission-aligned donors who understand the long game. Donors who give not just money but confidence. Donors who return year after year because they have seen what faithful investment produces.

NCF exists in the space between these two customers — not as a transaction processor, but as a bridge. We help fund holders give wisely, and we help ministries like Men of Nehemiah receive the sustained support they need to keep doing what no spreadsheet can fully capture.

I left that facility understanding, in a completely new way, why our fund holders give — and why NCF exists to help them do it well. The walls of broken lives are being rebuilt, one man at a time, in the spirit of Nehemiah. And generosity, channeled faithfully, is helping to lay every stone.

Visit Men of Nehemiah to learn moreopens in a new tab.