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“I don’t think I’d ever thought about a poor person.”

As a senior from the University of Illinois at Urbana 96, Marie Koch sat in the auditorium spellbound by the short video on the screen about the poor. “It was haunting,” she said. “I was crying and overwhelmed. I felt powerless—this is happening and I didn’t even care.”

Majoring in finance, Marie was prepared to help companies grow their businesses. But at Urbana she realized that she had never considered the plight of the poor.

Ironically, just three years earlier Marie was frustrated that students—Christian students—would be taking over her dorm room during Christmas break to attend Urbana, hosted at that time by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “They stayed in my dorm and then left us Jesus literature that I read in a mocking voice to girls on my hall,” she recalled.

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