MAURICE LIM MILLER
Sectors:
Target Population:
Family Independence Initiative
United States,
In a novel approach to addressing poverty, Maurice Lim Miller shifts ownership and priority-setting to low-income working families by pulling the professionals out of the picture and giving families direct access to the resources they need to lead their own change and help one another.
This profile below was
prepared when Maurice Lim Miller was elected to the Ashoka Fellowship in 2011.
Media Mentions
- Out of Poverty, Family-Style, The New York Times, July 15, 2011
INTRODUCTION
In a novel approach to addressing poverty, Maurice Lim Miller shifts ownership and priority-setting to low-income working families by pulling the professionals out of the picture and giving families direct access to the resources they need to lead their own change and help one another.
THE NEW IDEA
Having advanced more traditional anti-poverty and job training efforts in the 1980s and 1990s, Maurice saw that progress was slow and, more worrying, that the funding and incentive structures to aid the transition of low-income Americans into the middle-class ... Read More [+]
were misaligned with desired outcomes. He found that prevailing anti-poverty approaches were largely built around the deficits of America’s poor rather than their strengths: The more you needed, the more you got. While appropriate for people in crisis, that model isn’t a springboard to independence. In 2001, Maurice designed an approach to demonstrate the capacity that low-income families have to lead their own change. It leverages families’ strengths and supports them in helping each other. Over the last decade he has shown that resident-led solutions and mutuality—the simple practice of supporting one another—offers a lasting ladder into the middle-class. His effort eschews the label “program” because staff is forbidden from providing direction and families set their own goals. Family Independence Initiative (FII) invites families to pull together six to eight of their friends to work together to help each other for an initial two-year period, during which time they record and share their progress in a standardized way. These families can earn up to $2,000 per year—payment for their time spent recording data and sharing their stories with FII in group meetings. As they gain footing, and see themselves and other families succeed, they also actively contribute to growing the effort by changing stereotypes of poverty, bringing friends into the network, and supplying a continuous data stream and stories that shows their progress and illuminates what’s working and what’s not. The aggregate data allows Maurice’s team to guide thinkers in this field up a learning curve to a new understanding of the best principles and practices for transitioning the working poor to the middle-class. Currently, 300 families actively participate in California (San Francisco and Oakland) and Boston.
THE PROBLEM
2008 census numbers indicated there were 34 million households earning between $10,000 and $35,000 annually. Living from paycheck to paycheck leaves this portion of the population extremely vulnerable to unexpected emergencies and crises.
After a ... Read More [+] 47 year war on poverty most efforts do not demonstrate success in achieving the goal of moving low-income people into the middle-class. There is a growing realization that this country has lost its social and economic mobility. Resources to low-income families often come with case management and restrictions, and help families if they highlight their problems rather than their strengths.
Historically, self-organized efforts that are driven by communities have diminished for three interrelated reasons: (i) many of the families caught in poverty have stopped believing that their efforts can lead to success and they focus on surviving pay check to pay check (ii) there is a societal distrust that low-income families have the personal initiative to lead their own change or that they will help one another (iii) there are very few initiatives that trust families to self-organize, lead their own efforts and then make capital and connections to opportunities available directly to those self-organized efforts.
After a ... Read More [+] 47 year war on poverty most efforts do not demonstrate success in achieving the goal of moving low-income people into the middle-class. There is a growing realization that this country has lost its social and economic mobility. Resources to low-income families often come with case management and restrictions, and help families if they highlight their problems rather than their strengths.
Historically, self-organized efforts that are driven by communities have diminished for three interrelated reasons: (i) many of the families caught in poverty have stopped believing that their efforts can lead to success and they focus on surviving pay check to pay check (ii) there is a societal distrust that low-income families have the personal initiative to lead their own change or that they will help one another (iii) there are very few initiatives that trust families to self-organize, lead their own efforts and then make capital and connections to opportunities available directly to those self-organized efforts.
THE STRATEGY
After a decade of demonstrating that low-income families have the capacity to help themselves and each other if given direct access to resources, Maurice is now using that data to promote a broader, non-programmatic approach to assisting entire communities of ... Read More [+]
families to build their future the way they envision it. Rather than a focus on replication of the programmatic aspects of FII, in this new phase FII will work to have funders and policymakers change their giving criteria so that families that self-organize or are already self-organized get access to the resources they need in any part of the country.
The Family Independence Initiative is working to create a country in which families at any income level can come together with friends to determine their own futures; and a system of supports that responds to these self-determined paths.
In moving toward that vision, FII is documenting the amazing resourcefulness and resilience in this country’s low-income communities. The capacity of low-income families to help themselves and one another has been vastly underestimated. To realize this untapped potential, we must replace the stereotypes of low-income people as “lazy” or “helpless victims” with the reality of the hard working and capable working poor.
Families are the experts on their own lives and responsible for their own change. But trusting low-income families has not come easy to those in charge of creating the policies and practices meant to help these families. We call on professionals to learn from the examples of resident-led solutions, to trust and respect those they seek to help, and to adopt a supportive, follower role in their future efforts.
Creating a Mobility Platform
FII is developing and identifying resources to create a variety of benefits and connections they call the “mobility platform” that will support self-determination and respond to consumer demand and choice. Low-income families will be able to choose the resources they want to change their lives in the ways that make sense to them.
The system of supports our country has for the middle- and upper-income is made up of resources including tax benefits and preferential rates or opportunities. Middle- and upper-income families are trusted to pick and choose from the resources made available to them whether it’s mortgage interest deductions, a match to retirement savings, or alumni association membership. These families are able to exercise choice and control to build or sustain their wealth, assets, and security.
The system of supports for low-income families responds to needs rather than initiative. It also does not provide consumer-driven choices. This “safety-net” system is critical when people are in crisis, but it fails as providing the choices families must have to create sustainable progress in the lives. We need the “mobility platform” for those wishing to leave or avoid the safety-net system.
The Family Independence Initiative is working to create a country in which families at any income level can come together with friends to determine their own futures; and a system of supports that responds to these self-determined paths.
In moving toward that vision, FII is documenting the amazing resourcefulness and resilience in this country’s low-income communities. The capacity of low-income families to help themselves and one another has been vastly underestimated. To realize this untapped potential, we must replace the stereotypes of low-income people as “lazy” or “helpless victims” with the reality of the hard working and capable working poor.
Families are the experts on their own lives and responsible for their own change. But trusting low-income families has not come easy to those in charge of creating the policies and practices meant to help these families. We call on professionals to learn from the examples of resident-led solutions, to trust and respect those they seek to help, and to adopt a supportive, follower role in their future efforts.
Creating a Mobility Platform
FII is developing and identifying resources to create a variety of benefits and connections they call the “mobility platform” that will support self-determination and respond to consumer demand and choice. Low-income families will be able to choose the resources they want to change their lives in the ways that make sense to them.
The system of supports our country has for the middle- and upper-income is made up of resources including tax benefits and preferential rates or opportunities. Middle- and upper-income families are trusted to pick and choose from the resources made available to them whether it’s mortgage interest deductions, a match to retirement savings, or alumni association membership. These families are able to exercise choice and control to build or sustain their wealth, assets, and security.
The system of supports for low-income families responds to needs rather than initiative. It also does not provide consumer-driven choices. This “safety-net” system is critical when people are in crisis, but it fails as providing the choices families must have to create sustainable progress in the lives. We need the “mobility platform” for those wishing to leave or avoid the safety-net system.
THE PERSON
Maurice grew up in a Mexican boarder town and northern California, one of two children raised by a single parent—his mother, an immigrant from Mexico. The family was very poor—sometimes in crisis, other times stable—and his mother worked hard and gave ... Read More [+]
tremendous effort to ensuring the security and viability of her family. However, the strains of living pay check to pay check led to his sister and her kids falling into crisis.
His mother then concentrated all of their efforts on assuring that Maurice pursue a college degree, and he ended up getting an engineering degree at UC-Berkeley. He wasn’t terribly interested in engineering, but was amazed and puzzled to discover himself crossing into a completely different sphere of friends and influencers simply as a result of his education. He was again puzzled to see that the expectation shifted completely—from “No, you can’t do this, you’re poor,” to “Yes, success is expected, you have a college degree and anything is possible.”
Maurice lost his mother in his mid 20s, because she was not able to access assistance by taking initiative. He was an engineer for only a short time after college. He became absorbed in how to solve the poverty problem. Maurice took a job at a nascent organization, Asian Neighborhood Design, a nonprofit service agency, and over about twenty years, grew it from four to over one hundred staff. Maurice was lauded for his innovative approach, and invited by President Clinton to attend the State of the Union address in 1999. However, he had by then grown highly skeptical of the overall approach he was advancing.
Maurice learned a lot over the years, though, and had begun to formulate a new approach. In particular, his expectation of the working poor had shifted. Formerly, Maurice had felt that his mother’s effort had been singularly heroic, and that his life path into the middle-class was owing to her singular qualities and drive for a better life for her children. But as he delved over many years into poverty and how it operates in the context of families, he saw that many, many parents—single or raising children with their spouses or extended family support—apply the same drive, creativity, and tenacity. They want the best for their children and work very hard to get it. Their intention is not honored or enabled by the social structures or incentives currently in place.
Maurice began to study the history of marginalized groups building community and generating economic growth—the African American townships after slavery, the Cambodians building a donut empire in California, the Chinese—and saw that mutual support, coupled with access to some level of capital, spelled success for entire communities, over and over again.
Drawing on insights gleaned from his life and his work, Maurice started FII in 2001. He lives in Oakland, and has two children; one attending college on the East Coast and another that recently graduated and is living as an Artist.
His mother then concentrated all of their efforts on assuring that Maurice pursue a college degree, and he ended up getting an engineering degree at UC-Berkeley. He wasn’t terribly interested in engineering, but was amazed and puzzled to discover himself crossing into a completely different sphere of friends and influencers simply as a result of his education. He was again puzzled to see that the expectation shifted completely—from “No, you can’t do this, you’re poor,” to “Yes, success is expected, you have a college degree and anything is possible.”
Maurice lost his mother in his mid 20s, because she was not able to access assistance by taking initiative. He was an engineer for only a short time after college. He became absorbed in how to solve the poverty problem. Maurice took a job at a nascent organization, Asian Neighborhood Design, a nonprofit service agency, and over about twenty years, grew it from four to over one hundred staff. Maurice was lauded for his innovative approach, and invited by President Clinton to attend the State of the Union address in 1999. However, he had by then grown highly skeptical of the overall approach he was advancing.
Maurice learned a lot over the years, though, and had begun to formulate a new approach. In particular, his expectation of the working poor had shifted. Formerly, Maurice had felt that his mother’s effort had been singularly heroic, and that his life path into the middle-class was owing to her singular qualities and drive for a better life for her children. But as he delved over many years into poverty and how it operates in the context of families, he saw that many, many parents—single or raising children with their spouses or extended family support—apply the same drive, creativity, and tenacity. They want the best for their children and work very hard to get it. Their intention is not honored or enabled by the social structures or incentives currently in place.
Maurice began to study the history of marginalized groups building community and generating economic growth—the African American townships after slavery, the Cambodians building a donut empire in California, the Chinese—and saw that mutual support, coupled with access to some level of capital, spelled success for entire communities, over and over again.
Drawing on insights gleaned from his life and his work, Maurice started FII in 2001. He lives in Oakland, and has two children; one attending college on the East Coast and another that recently graduated and is living as an Artist.
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