Helping people move out of poverty will require giving them a greater sense of power and belonging in society at large, according to a Gates Foundation study two years in the making.
The U.S. Partnership on Mobility From Poverty, a project run by the Urban Institute, which was created with $3.7 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, conducted the study. The project brought together 24 academic, business, and nonprofit leaders to forge a solution to poverty.
Members of the partnership were not directed to come to a consensus on the best way forward. Instead, they offered more than a dozen papers with suggestions on how to proceed.
But there was one overarching area of agreement, said Nisha Patel, the partnership’s executive director. The stigma of poverty must be eliminated, she said, and poor people must feel their life has meaning.
“Poverty is about more than economic success,” she said. “Equally important are the notions of power, agency, and autonomy.”
Watching Gates’s Next Move
In recent years, many grant makers, notably the Ford Foundation and the Meyer Memorial Trust, have directed their efforts toward fighting inequality, including reducing income disparities in the United States. It is not clear whether Gates will use the partnership’s findings to join the fray. The foundation, which has $41 billion in assets, declined an interview request.
“We continue to learn from the partnership and its findings and are assessing additional opportunities for impact,” a spokeswoman wrote in an email.
Ms. Patel, who previously served as a program officer at Gates, is crossing her fingers.
“That is my hope,” she said, “but I can’t speak for the foundation.”
Different Worlds
The partnership members met with nonprofits and community members in more than 30 site visits across the country, including the Mississippi Delta, Silicon Valley, and Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.
The visits demonstrated that even when in geographic proximity, the poor live in a starkly different world than the rich. While visiting Mexican immigrant families in San Jose, within a dozen miles of Google’s tech campus and venture-capital firms waiting to shower money on tech start-ups, a woman asked the partnership members in Spanish: “What is this ‘Silicon Valley’ you keep talking about?
That conversation and their other visits helped the partnership members conclude that any plan to help people advance out of poverty had to do five things: change the “narrative” surrounding poor people; provide access to good, meaningful jobs; ensure that people aren’t thwarted from improving their lot simply because of where they live; provide support that helps empower recipients; and better use data to inform decision making.
In the accompanying position papers, the panel members flesh out these broad themes. In the area of providing good jobs, for instance, panel members offer thoughts on using community colleges to create “concrete pathways to specific skilled jobs.” Another paper looks at transforming low-prestige jobs with minimal wages and erratic hours, such as home health-care providers, into positions with greater upward mobility.
Hoping for a ‘Game Changer’
On their own, the findings aren’t new, says Ms. Patel. But taken together, they offer a good shot at being a “game changer.”
“The problems are big,” she said. “The solutions will take connected work.”
Roxane White, a member of the panel and “innovator in residence” at the Aspen Institute, agreed. She said she is taking the holistic approach to heart in her work as a trustee of the Rose Community Foundation in Colorado.
“No one strategy, intervention, or public policy is going to solve this,” she said. “It’s an opportunity for foundations to work together. My hope is the Gates Foundation will lead that.”
The group punted on some issues. For instance, the increased automation of many service and manufacturing jobs has given rise to the notion that providing people with a minimum level of income, regardless of work, would alleviate poverty.
Members of the group did not agree on the issue, deciding it needed further study, according to Anthony Iton, senior vice president for healthy communities at the California Endowment.
“Work matters a lot for people, for their dignity, health, and sense of purpose,” he said. “A universal basic income, depending on how it is constructed, could undermine some of those important aspects of human dignity.”
Hot Topic
To make a difference, foundations will have to develop ways of measuring whether grantees are helping their beneficiaries develop a greater sense that they can make gains in their lives. That won’t necessarily be easy, according to Ms. Patel, but it could make philanthropic investments pay off.
If Gates decides to get involved, it has company. In addition to Ford and Meyer, other grant makers are showing a greater interest in various aspects of the partnership’s approach.
Google.org, the philanthropic arm of the search engine giant, for instance, announced in June a $50 million investment in the “future of work.” Steve Ballmer, former Microsoft chief executive, has focused much of his philanthropy on economic mobility in Seattle, Los Angeles, and Detroit. And the Rockefeller Foundation is poised to make a large commitment on domestic jobs as soon as in March.
Said Ms. Patel: “For the first time in my career, this is a hot topic.”