A radical idea for eradicating poverty

Maurice Lim Miller is the Founder and CEO of the Family Independence Initiative (FII), which started in Oakland and is now seen as a national model.

MAURICE LIM MILLER: The Family Independence Initiative is a national organization that’s looking for innovation. It’s looking for innovation around poverty issues, both from those that are in positions of influence and from the families themselves. And it’s trying to bring those two sets of minds closer together and trying to activate both those in positions of influence that care about this issue and the families that care about these issues so that they can work together, and really become the national demonstration of how this society can rebuild itself.

Maurice Lim Miller was recently named to the White House Council for Community Solutions. He believes that low-income people have the resources to use their social networks to find their own ways to build wealth and find solutions to community problems. There were some defining moments that led Maurice Miller to his radical approach to eradicating poverty.

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MAURICE LIM MILLER: Actually, there’s two stories that probably have the biggest impact on me. One happened I think in 1979 or 1980, when I first got my job in the non-profit sector – I quit engineering after I lost my mother. I wanted to impact poverty, and I got the job running a construction-training program to help gang kids leave gangs and get jobs in construction. And at one point in time, I was running the program and I had only one training slot left. And there were these two kids that came in – one was obviously dragging the other one in to apply – and I had them fill out the applications. I went back and I came out after looking at them, and I said, “Well, I’m giving the slot to Richard, who just got out of juvenile hall,” because he’d just been in a robbery.

And so Richard looks at his friend, who had not been on the robbery, and he said, “Well, how come I got it and Ben didn’t get it?” I said, “Well it’s a needs-based system, and you show more need.” So Richard turned to Ben and said, “See, you should’ve gone on the robbery with me!”

That message stuck with me from the late ‘70s ... it’s like, “What kind of message did I just send?” When you’re low-income, there is nothing that recognizes Ben and the fact that he wouldn’t go on that robbery and that he dragged his friend in, and that basically, you have to wait until you get in trouble before we give help. That’s the way our system is set up. And so that stuck with me for a long time.

The other story which I learned a lot from was after I started the Family Independence Initiative in Oakland. This was one family – Jorge and his wife Maria. And they didn’t stand out in any kind of way. We enroll families in groups of families with their friends. These were refugee families from El Salvador – they had no savings, all of the extra money they had was always sent back to El Salvador, to their village. They wanted to go back to their village if they could.

But one day, Jorge and and his wife came in and announced that they’re going to buy a house. And we’re there, “How are you going to do that? You don’t have any savings and whatever for down payments.” “Well, this real estate agent, he speaks Spanish, he told us he can help us buy this house. And our friends are going to donate money, and we’re going to try to get this house.” And we’re like, well, our project was really a research project to see what families would do on their own, and my staff wanted to know, “Well, can we send him through financial training?” I said, “No, this is really about understanding what they do.” And it was pretty clear after a while that it was a predatory lender, and my staff was really getting upset that we couldn’t say anything, and my staff gets fired if they say anything. Because our whole role was to understand what families do – our role wasn’t to interfere.

HOLLY KERNAN: You were getting this early glimpse into the sub-prime predatory lending crisis...

MILLER: Yes. It was clear – he was both the real estate agent and the mortgage broker. So, he was controlling the entire process. So when they closed, sure enough, the mortgage payment was 65% of their income, and our staff comes back like, “They’re going to lose the house.” And I’m like, “Well, they’re going to lose the house. But everybody in their network’s going to know that this guy, this predatory lender screwed ‘em, and you know, hopefully his reputation will be bad.”

But the next thing that happened was really amazing. All those people that loaned them money all of a sudden descended on this house, re-painted it, re-tiled it, re-landscaped – six months later, they ask me to sit in on a refinance. They got their payments down to near 40%, and it was clear that they were not going to lose that house. They had a community behind this house.

Within two months of Jorge and Maria stabilizing their house, the savings line – ‘cause we track income, and the families kind of see it – all of a sudden the savings line for every Salvadorean refugee started going up. And I’m over there, “How come you guys are saving now?” And they’re like, “Well, if Jorge and them can by a house, we can buy a house.” And sure enough, within a year and a half, all the other five families had bought a home.

The other piece that was amazing was, not only did everybody in that cohort group change and buy a house and build assets in the United States, is that it had a ripple effect. Other people they knew that now saw this group buying homes start feeling that they could buy homes in the United States. And it started having a much longer generational ripple effect in the broader community, and that’s what we’ve seen in the other projects.

So, if we had come in to save Jorge and that house initially, this is not likely to have happened, because it would have been dependent on us. The fact that they knew that they could count on each other and make this happen, that issue of the social networks and the kind of help that ... you know, historically, that’s how people have gotten out of poverty. And they solved their own problems. That’s empowering. Having somebody save you is not empowering.

KERNAN: Tell me about this moment in 1999 when Jerry Brown called you, you were working in anti-poverty programs. And he said something to you that helped change the way that you thought about this anti-poverty work?

MILLER: Jerry Brown was the mayor of Oakland, and he was really conscious of the ... we’d already had a 30-year war on poverty, and we didn’t seem to be impacting poverty. But he caught me at a really interesting time, because I was questioning the same thing. By the mid-‘90s, I was questioning the services that we provided – not that we didn’t help people, but I didn’t come into this work to do charity work. I wanted social change. I came out of Berkeley in the ‘60s, and it was supposed to be some fundamental change. Something was going wrong if for 30 years, some of the smartest people hadn’t come up with solutions. And I ran what was considered one of the best set of services in the country. So, I was already questioning.

What Jerry [Brown] did was provide an opening for me that I’d never even thought of. It’s like, “What if I could really do what I wanted to?” And for him, there was no box. For me, there had always been a box – we were poor, even when I ran social services, I had to please my funders. I was good at pushing the box, but there was always the box. And all of a sudden, he said, “Look, you can do anything.” He had no box. And that was fascinating to meet somebody who had no box and said, “What if you had no box? What would you really do?”

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The Family Independence Initiative fosters social networks and lets people decide how best to solve problems in their neighborhoods. But, Lim says, that’s still a radical idea. Most people see poverty differently…

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MILLER: There’s this huge stereotype that families don’t and won’t take initiative unless somebody prompts them – they don’t know what to do, what direction to go, they’re going to make too many mistakes, that they’re lazy, they won’t help each other, they’ll pull each other back, the crab-in-the-pot thing.

All these stereotypes were such that when families would earn some money from us for reporting what they do so we could learn from them and we’d pay them – all the questions I would get would be, “Well, how do you monitor how they spend their money?” And the implication being that obviously they can’t manage money. The second question would be, “Well, what if they spend it on drugs?” I’m in there like, “Well, middle- and upper-income [people] spend more money on drugs than low-income folks, and we don’t monitor what they do with their refund check.”

So those kinds of stereotypes are really endemic in the social service sector, whether you’re on the liberal side or the conservative side.

KERNAN: So, how’d you get beyond them?

MILLER: We actually haven’t. That’s something that we’re still living with, and in many ways the work that I advise doing is trying to highlight the fact that those stereotypes aren’t right. That there’s a ton of initiative, a ton of resourcefulness, and what you need to do is, when you go into a neighborhood, you need to look at the strengths. We have a system right now that’s needs-based. It was set up to be a safety net for people in need, and then we’ve kept it as if that was going to be the springboard up. And that’s not. There needs to be a different systems.

One of the things that I learned, and is kind of a story I use, is that when we were first going into Boston, I was sitting in a meeting with a lot of funders and policy people, and they were describing how in one section of Boston – that it’s really terrible conditions. The schools are bad, people don’t trust the police, the neighborhood’s really tough, and 50% of the kids are not graduating. And so as we got into the conversation, obviously there’s a big concern about that large percentage, and people are like, “How are we going to help that 50%?” And I’m there like, “Wait, you’re telling me that given these conditions, which are really pretty awful, that 50% actually graduate?” You know, there’s something there. If 50% can actually graduate out of that same situation, maybe we should go talk to them.

And what happens is because we’re really do-gooders, we tend to intervene with our ideas way too soon. We don’t listen to people, we don’t find out what their strengths are. We totally ignore the fact that 50% are graduating. And we need to look at, what is that resilience? And we need to build off that resilience that already exists.

KERNAN: And that’s what Family Independence Initiative has done, is to empower people to make their own choices about how to make their lives and their communities better. And you seem like you’ve got this three-part secret sauce: access to relatively small amounts of cash as incentives, fostering existing strong social networks, and this whole idea of dignity and self-determination.

MILLER: That was actually very good! (laughs)

KERNAN: Did I summarize it?

MILLER: (laughing) Yeah!

KERNAN: But how did you do that? You started here in Oakland.

MILLER: I started a lot because I would measure everything against what my mother could do. You know? (laughs) She had initiative, and she wanted that recognized. She didn’t want to recognize just the fact that she didn’t have a job; it’s that she’s looking for a job. So that initiative, that piece of resilience, individual resilience and leadership, resourcefulness – that obviously is the key.

The other piece is that when I became middle-income, it became really clear to me that the way people were getting jobs ... all the rich kids got summer jobs, and it was all through networks. I had to go to Summer Youth Program for the mayor’s office, which had very few of the jobs, none of the decent jobs. So it was all social networks. And when you needed to hire a lawyer, you’d call a friend who might know a lawyer, and they’d give you a referral, and then you’d use their name so that you could get heard by the other lawyer. And this issue of social networks and accountability and all that was really where all the opportunities lay, and it was totally different when I went into the world that my mother and my sister and I came from. Those social networks weren’t there.

Those people that had those opportunities and social network – for some reason wanted to be “charitable,” but actually what we needed was access to their networks. If we worked hard, why couldn’t we be a part of that? Graduating from U.C. Berkeley was amazing – all I had to do was say that I’d graduated from the place, some automatic type of credibility. We don’t have those kinds of institutions for families. What we have are institutions that say, “I’m helping these families because they’re needy, ‘cause there’s something wrong with them.” And as long as the primary thing that is happening is the one we’ve talked about with low-income communities and we get pictures of them, always see the needs part – then that stereotype continues.

KERNAN: So how do you, if you could wave your magic wand, the magic wand that former Mayor Jerry Brown wanted to give you – what would you do to change the way that we frame and look at poverty?

MILLER: I think there’s two things. One is that, for those of us that want to help bring about social change, we have to start painting a different picture. And we need to paint the picture that it isn’t a dependence on our ideas and our initiatives and our networks, that it really is that the families surviving under some of the worst conditions are amazingly resilient and resourceful. Some of it is my being on a radio show like this to basically tell the story that there really is and that for us, collecting the data that shows that, without increasing staff, 400 families are going to be helping each other. And they’re going to be making better progress than most programs that have huge numbers of staff. That’s the story that we can tell from our sector.

The other thing, though, is that we’re coming into a new period. When you look at what’s happened in the Middle East and when you look at what happened in the ‘60s, which is what I came out of – it was an issue of self-organizing. And that’s what’s happening right now, and a lot of young people are doing it. And so for me, a lot of it is going back into the community and saying, “It’s your kids, it’s your community, it’s your friends, it’s your culture. You need to start demanding what is really important for you. You need to push this program.”

There is an opening right now. There’s frustration in society right now. Things aren’t working. Jerry [Brown] recognized this 10 years ago. But right now, it’s gotten worse. And it’s national, that there really is frustration, that this isn’t really working. And this is an opportunity for the families to really come up and say, “Okay. So now it’s our turn – we’re going to take this over. We’re going to organize ourselves. And you need to make resources available to us based on our initiative, on our strength. Not just our needs.”

KERNAN: And that’s what Family Independence Initiative is trying to do, is doing all around the country, and you’ve actually been recognized by President Barack Obama for this.

MILLER: Yes, I think some of what the President and his staff was interested in was the issue of civic participation. The Obama revolution with young people, really self-organizing, you know, helping him get into office – that’s self-organizing piece especially by young people is something that I think he recognized was endemic in our work. And what we do is, we’re pushing families, like, “You have to do this. You have to now put out your word. Don’t count on us. Don’t count on the other sector.”

KERNAN: Do you make a distinction between the social safety net – and I want to throw out a statistic here which is that 30% of Californians have no personal financial safety net, and so there is a need for programs like Section 8 vouchers, crisis-based safety nets – and what you’re trying to do is create economic mobility. Do you make a distinction between these?

MILLER: There’s a huge distinction. However, it’s one of the most misunderstood things in this country. In order to try to address poverty issues and the fact that we weren’t building a middle class, that what we ended up doing is creating a safety net that initially, what I thought when it was formed, was to help people in crisis. If my sister really got in trouble, if somebody in my family really had mental health problem and whatever, that we didn’t have money, and so there needed to be these different services. That the more need you have, the more interventions would have to happen in order to stabilize you. And stabilizing was really important because obviously letting it be a bigger and bigger crisis, you end up being homeless and everything else. And in many ways takes more resources. So the issue was to identify need. That need in terms of crisis will always exist, and we’re always going to have to have a safety net.

The dilemma is then when people stabilize, when they want to take the iniative and get a job – they need a different platform. They need a platform that’s much more like what we have for middle- and upper-income. When they take initiative and buy a house, they get a mortgage deduction. They buy two houses, they get more deductions. And those types of things don’t exist when you get down into lower-income, even near the poverty level. There just isn’t anything for them. And so they’re having to struggle in a safety net that really was set up for a different purpose, and somehow tries to modify itself and say, “We can be both a needs-based and strength-based piece.” And that’s not really possible.

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