04/22/2026
There is a particular kind of silence that settles over a person when they encounter poverty up close, not the abstracted poverty of statistics, but the lived reality of families whose labor sustains a global industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
Brad Fassbender encountered that silence in the highlands of Latin America. He came home changed.
Before that moment, he had spent his first years out of college in financial services, where performance was measured month by month in production, quotas, and sales metrics. He was helping others pursue financial security through insurance and long-term investment planning — but over time, something began to unsettle him.
The system measured value in returns and growth, but rarely considered the deeper realities behind those numbers — the people, the labor, and the human cost embedded within the markets themselves. He found himself questioning whether what he was building truly reflected the kind of value he believed in.
Drawn by his Catholic faith and a desire to pursue God's will for his life, he joined a mission in Central America that assisted the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal in their work.
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