New Anti-Poverty Program
Harnesses Peers, Financial Rewards

 

A new way to address poverty is being tested in Boston. Traditional anti-poverty programs have long depended on case workers, but this privately-funded initiative asks low-income families to rely on their peers. The initial results are promising. The non-profit Family Independence Initiative, or FII, encourages low-income families to define their own goals and work towards them in mutual support groups, while carefully documenting their successes. (F.I.I. pays modest stipends for this documentation which is used as research data). So far, the few hundred families that F.I.I. has worked with have demonstrated impressive gains in areas like income and savings, debt reduction, skills training, and improvements in children’s grades and health care.

One of the things that distinguishes F.I.I.’s work is the way it creates a context that allows families to discover their individual and collective strengths and act upon them. To this end, F.I.I.’s staff members are not permitted to offer any advice or guidance to families. F.I.I.’s founder Maurice Lim Miller believes that upward mobility comes when people take control and make choices. That process can be circumvented by professionals who would step in too quickly to prescribe solutions and/or inadvertently focus on challenges rather than harnessing strengths.

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