When it comes to poverty alleviation in our most struggling communities, both our public and our private efforts can let our suffering neighbors down. Public efforts are by their very nature faceless. They must assess the situation of an individual citizen entirely in terms of statistical facts like income or family size. Public assistance doesn’t pray with you in the middle of the night when there’s been a terrible crime on your street. Public assistance can’t walk with you when you’ve finally landed a job but your manager is infuriating. Nor can public assistance say no to you if you’re mired in addiction and need to be allowed to hit bottom. Public assistance can’t do these things because it’s not a person—it’s a system. The system can register you, send you a check, even create a jobs training mechanism. But it can’t know you and it can’t love you. It might even tell you to walk away from that promotion or from that relationship because, if you don’t, you’ll lose what it, the system, gives you. It can’t gain your trust over the course of years until you’re finally ready to tell it your own vision for your life and your neighborhood. And it won’t be there to work with you through all the frustrating details of starting that business or building those community gardens. It won’t because it can’t. It’s not in its nature.
When we think of helping the poor, we often conjure up government programs that result in low-income citizens getting stuck in their poverty from one generation to the next. But what if we invested not in classes of people or even in whole communities—but in single city blocks? And what if that investment was very personal? Some folks in St. Louis are doing just that. Welcome to a new model of philanthropy.
On the other hand, as we learned from the Marvin Olasky’s classic The Tragedy of American Compassion, private, and often religious, poverty alleviation could do all these things well. And prior to a certain ideological shift in the mid-19th century, it did. One poor man might need prayer and a hot meal, another was sent to chop wood for a widow before he was fed, another young man might need to move in with a family and become part of their daily life. Because of the reality of deep personal presence, these sorts of prayerful distinctions could be made by those treating the poor person as an individual and not a category. Olasky describes how the rise of public assistance redefined the way we help the poor. It turned the complicated project of face-to-face ministry into the straightforward task of the soup kitchen. It put the nameless poor into a line and handed them what they needed merely to survive. Private philanthropy began to adopt this strategy lest it be accused of distinguishing between the “deserving” and the “undeserving poor.” But an unwillingness to treat alms like mere handouts need not be a condemnation of the person being refused. On the contrary, our earlier way of doing philanthropy looked for ways we could honor the dignity of a person by exchanging with him. If recipients have something to offer in a legitimate exchange, they are no longer mere “takers” but rather burgeoning businessmen or businesswomen. Exchange honors the thing in us that knows we have something to contribute and that resents being treated like we’re useless to our neighbors.
Lucas Rouggly, founder of the neighborhood stabilization ministry LOVEtheLOU in St. Louis, on whose board I sit, explains that nowadays we make it a full-time job to be poor. Food over here on this day, some clothes over there on that day, help with a utility bill somewhere else on another day. The system we’ve created is giving us the result we ought to expect: people whose days are filled with just getting by and who are becoming increasingly economically hopeless. They have a vision but no voice. Over time, the poverty mindset creeps in: “This is just the way things are. I’ll never get out. There’s no point in trying.” Meanwhile, we middle- and upper-income people can feel pretty good about our efforts. We offered that personal finance class on that one Saturday. We cleaned up that empty lot. We held that coat drive at work. We did … something. But often what we did was to “help” our struggling neighbors without really seeing them. In contrast, my friend Ismael Hernandez, founder and executive director of the Freedom & Virtue Institute, says, “I don’t care about your poverty—I care about you.” When we pursue the neighborhood stabilization model in St. Louis that I am about to describe, this is what we say to our neighbors: You’re not just some number to me. You’re not just a name on a list. I’m not helping you because a computer spat you out as a member of some statistically “relevant” group. As Dallas Willard would say, “You are a never-ceasing spiritual being with an eternal destiny in God’s great universe.” You are made in the image of the living God. You have intellect and will! You have a little kingdom—your life—in which you get to choose.
The Neighborhood Stabilization Model
The first component of this new way to do local philanthropy is to look for opportunities to exchange and to use our gifts sparingly. Robert Lupton, in his masterful book Toxic Charity, quotes the Oath for Compassionate Helpers that he and his team at Focused Community Strategies are committed to:
I will never do for others what they have the capacity to do for themselves.
I will limit one-way giving to crises and seek always to find ways for legitimate exchange.I will seek ways to empower by hiring, lending, and investing and offer gifts as incentives to celebrate achievements.
I will put the interests of those experiencing poverty above my own even when it means setting aside my own agenda or the agenda of my organization.
I will listen carefully, even to what is not being said, knowing that unspoken feelings may contain essential clues to healthy engagement.
And, above all, to the best of my ability,
I WILL DO NO HARM.
This commitment honors the dignity and personhood of our neighbors. It treats them as people who have something good to offer, with whom we can trade just as we do with our middle- and upper-income neighbors. By intentionally seeking out opportunities for legitimate exchange, we contribute to shalom—not just peace, but wholeness. As persons we are meant to realize our capacities, to share our gifts and abilities with others. While paid work is one way in which we can use our gifts, we should not underplay the significance of other kinds of real participation in the economy, not just in terms of income but also of self-worth. The data is clear: one of the most stultifying experiences a person can suffer is long-term unemployment, and that’s because God told us in Genesis 2 to care for the earth and to work it. Work is part of what it is to be human.
The second component of the neighborhood stabilization model is its hyper-local, holistic focus and long-term commitment. There are several reasons it matters deeply to focus on an area as small as a block for a period of at least 8–10 years. To return to that word shalom, we bring wholeness when we come to our neighbors rather than making them come to us. First, many of our most struggling neighborhoods are economically isolated as a result of disastrous federal policies that Marcus M. Witcher and I chronicled in Black Liberation Through the Marketplace: Hope, Heartbreak, and the Promise of America. Zoning laws separated homes from work and sent those in need of high-density housing far from their jobs. The red-lining policies of the Federal Housing Administration made it illegal for banks to sell mortgages in Black and interracial neighborhoods. Urban renewal, a slum-clearance program known to many as “Negro removal,” destroyed Black neighborhoods just as Black Americans were breaking out of poverty in huge numbers. As if all this weren’t enough, the building of the Federal Highway System naturally targeted the poorest communities for demolition, even though many of these were home to upwardly mobile, working-class people.
To add insult to injury, the impulse to socially engineer kicked into high gear as municipal leaders, determined to kill two birds with one stone, both created their perfect, efficient highways and built a massive wall of concrete between whites and non-whites. While many immigrants and some Black Americans were able to escape, the least well-off in the community were left behind, trapped in a never-ending cycle of non-ownership behind a literal barrier to work and trade.
Finally, the deeply perverse incentives of the welfare state affected our most vulnerable population first: poor Black Americans. But it didn’t stop there. The devolution of family structure has spread to almost all demographic groups in the U.S. As families broke down, general economic improvement simply couldn’t keep up with the meteoric rise in single motherhood.
Different Kinds of Poverty—and Opportunities
The poverty of our inner-city neighbors is not always about a lack of cash; it’s also about a lack of safety and the networks so many of us take for granted. Dad will show me how to open that bank account. Uncle Bob will hire me at his dealership. I’ll ask Cathy’s mom about my career-path ideas. But what if Dad isn’t around, Uncle Bob is unemployed, and I’m so uncertain that I’ll even make it to 21 that I have no plans for a career? Tragically, the one-two-three-four-five punch of federal intervention into the lives of the poor serves as a perfect example of what happens when we dishonor freedom of contract, property rights, and equal protection under the rule of law. We take away the infrastructure of justice that allows for the flourishing of creative exchange. We fill the empty holes left behind with Soviet-style projects and are then baffled as to why they devolve into chaos. The inhumanity of the progressive, scientistic, central-planning mindset breeds more inhumanity still.
Extreme isolation translates into deep mistrust. For the most dedicated, it can easily take the first six years to gain the trust of the neighbors. Neighbors must see that I am not going to leave them when the ministry van gets stolen, or when a terrible crime occurs, or when the van gets stolen again. They must see that I am genuinely interested in them and their ideas for their own block. I show that I am there for them when they are processing the pain of yet another young man gunned down on the street.
In the case of inner-city poverty, there is often a strong territorialism between neighborhoods. This means that a 4-to-6-block area may, for a young person especially, feel like the whole world. Telling him that there are job opportunities five miles away is like telling him there’s an opportunity in Japan. It could take him an hour and a half bus ride just to get there, and outside the neighborhood, he won’t know if he’s protected.
The deeply perverse incentives of the welfare state affected our most vulnerable population first: poor, Black Americans.
Alternatively, if some of the neighbors clear an abandoned lot and turn it into a community garden that neighbors are paid to run, then the job opportunity has been brought to the seeker. Just walking down the street on a Saturday morning, a neighbor can see the activity, stop and ask about the opportunity, and realistically embrace it. And when something good is happening on my block, it means it’s probably not just a one-off. A bunch of the kids are in the student program or several of the adults have started businesses or gotten their home refurbished. Even if I begin to slip into hopelessness again, I only need to wait until Saturday morning to hear the buzzing of the lawnmowers from the group of teens the city pays to clean up empty lots. Or I can see the cars pulling into the farmers market at the community gardens. There are beautiful pictures of the places and people I know taken by people I know on display at the farmer’s market. There are carpenters from a local church on the front lawn turning the spindles for Ms. Tawana’s historic staircase. The possibility of change, the opportunity for something good, isn’t far away where I can’t see or hear it—it’s right here on my own block. Now when I’m discouraged I can go to Ms. Tawana’s or Lucas’ or Miss Sharon’s house, and they will feed me and pray with me and laugh with me. Maybe I won’t sink under the weight of my trauma if I can actively envision a way forward and know who can help me get there. By the time one block is stabilized, there are neighbors involved from nearby blocks—and now the hope is spreading.
Don’t think that 10 years per block is too long! Think of how many decades we’ve spent on failed policies and ham-fisted charity that tried to impress donors and government grantors with big numbers! You can feed 1,000 people every week for a year, and 30 years from now you’ll be feeding their grandchildren. But focus in on 40 kids and their parents and friends on one block and before you know it they’ll be the ones going to the next block and the next one to bring shalom to their own neighborhood. The poor don’t need to be rescued—they need to be heard and empowered.
The Neighborhood Practitioner
The third component of the neighborhood stabilization model comes from the great John Perkins. Perkins brings his faith directly into his concept of the neighborhood practitioner. The practitioner is someone who has such a strong sense of personal brokenness and need for God that there is no sense of superiority in him. He is well aware that given the same circumstances he would be in the same place as those around him. He knows that while he may have the education and the networks of a middle- or upper-income person, he may not have the hard-won spiritual insight of some of his neighbors. He knows that while he may be sacrificing something from a worldly perspective to move into what some would call a “bad” neighborhood, only he can truly understand what he has gained from the deep relationships he’s formed. The practitioner is also realistic about the distrust, the trauma, and the anger that papers over hurt. He doesn’t take it personally when it flares up. Most importantly, the true practitioner has no agenda of his own for the neighborhood besides the flourishing of the people in it. Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert’s book When Helping Hurts reminds us that the practitioner simply wants to help without hurting.
That last point is essential, because the social engineering mindset that has damaged our communities so deeply says, “I know what’s best for you. I’ll rescue you. You must be poor because you’re incapable of doing anything to help yourself, so I won’t even bother asking for your input.” I was struck by something in Lucas Rouggly’s When the Sirens Stop: A True Story of Restoration in North St. Louis, a moving memoir about Lucas’ neighbors on Enright Boulevard. A younger, very sincere, but perhaps less wise Lucas organized a block party. He insisted that everything be provided for free so that no one had to buy or contribute food. But he was stopped in his tracks by the neighborhood matriarch, Miss Sharon, who rebuked him: “Don’t you dare take away their chance to help own the block.” Lucas observed that Miss Sharon “knew the hearts of her neighbors, and she knew that they had something to offer.” He changed gears, recruiting various neighbors to bring side dishes and drinks, direct traffic, and set up a basketball hoop. A few neighbors formed a blues band and provided the entertainment! Others discreetly handed Lucas a little cash to cover hot dog costs and, having listened to Miss Sharon’s wisdom, he happily took it.
The neighborhood practitioner has such a strong sense of personal brokenness and need for God that there is no sense of superiority in him.
On another occasion, Lucas began to get requests from suburban church groups to come down to the block and help out. He started with a simple trash clean-up, but once again, Miss Sharon was offended. “We can clean up our own trash!” Instead, she told the group that they were going to dismantle the porch of the drug house so that there’d no good place for the dealers to hang out anymore. Miss Sharon didn’t mind accepting some help from the volunteer group, but she needed them to do something very specific, based on her local knowledge. In fact, this was a turning point for Enright Blvd. The volunteers helped tear down the porch, but it was Miss Sharon who called a neighborhood meeting to set up the new crime watch. And when Miss Sharon calls a neighborhood meeting, everyone shows up.
Bring on the Josephs
This brings us to the fourth component of the neighborhood stabilization model. This one is called by many names: persons of peace, “Josephs,” and social entrepreneurs. Just because somebody lives in a tough neighborhood doesn’t mean they’ve given up on it. In most neighborhoods, there are a few anchors on the block, neighbors who’ve been scrambling to help as much as they possibly can but have lacked support. These persons of peace are the beating heart of the neighborhood stabilization model, because the mission of the neighborhood practitioner is to tap into their vision for the neighborhood and simply support it. As the best nonprofit leaders say, we’re trying to put ourselves out of business. The ultimate goal is always to cultivate leaders from the block. The great Bob Woodson calls these men and women “Josephs” because they are healing agents in the neighborhood. They are assets for future flourishing and growth. Like the biblical Joseph who was sold into slavery by his brothers but whom God used to save Egypt, these Josephs are resilient people, often of deep faith, and they have not allowed their trials to make them bitter. The neighborhood stabilization model helps us recognize these neighbors and see their gifts because we come into the neighborhood looking for them. We’ve stopped assuming that because a neighborhood is destabilized it has no assets, nothing to offer to us or exchange with us, and no one to lead.
Lucas met Frank immediately upon moving into his Enright Boulevard neighborhood, and Frank took it upon himself to keep Lucas abreast of dangerous situations and help him understand how to navigate them and keep his family safe. Miss Sharon lived right across the street and became an important mentor to Lucas. Miss Tawana is an incredibly generous and forgiving person who busied herself caring for children—her own and those of others. When an opportunity to rent-to-own a refurbished home came up, everyone knew that Tawana not only would benefit from owning and having something to pass on but also use her beautiful home to bless others. And this is exactly what she did when she arranged for grocery distribution to the elderly and homebound during COVID—she turned her beautiful, newly refurbished home into a food pantry and recruited neighbors to help.
As Bob Woodson puts it, for our most destabilized neighbors, a far more pressing problem than racism limits their ability to break out of poverty. That problem is elitism. In our ignorant pride, we infantilize our neighbors and exalt ourselves. Lucas tells many stories of the epiphanies he underwent as a white dude from a small town in southern Missouri. There was so much he didn’t understand: about the system, about the mindset, about the particulars of this neighborhood. What hubris to assume we have the answers! The problems of our destabilized inner-city neighborhoods are legion and have been long in the making. Their solutions will be complex, too, as well as specific from locale to locale. Poor people are not a monolith. This is yet another reason that our Josephs, our persons of peace, are so essential to any vision for change. They’re the ones who really and truly know the neighborhood.
Not Only Politics and Markets, but the Church
Keen readers might have noticed something. My prophets of neighborhood stabilization—Marvin Olasky, John Perkins, Bob Woodson, Robert Lupton, and Brian Fikkert—are not necessarily aligned with one another politically. Olasky is associated with the welfare reforms of the 1990s, led by Newt Gingrich and the Republicans. John Perkins is a former civil rights activist who’s been using the phrase “social justice” since the 1970s. His watchwords are “Relocation, Reconciliation, and Redistribution.” To be fair, Perkins is also critical of government programs and challenges the Church to redistribute the time, talent, and treasure of its more well-resourced members to create economic flourishing in the inner cities. But he definitely affirms the reality of institutional as well as individual injustice and sees the Church’s redistribution as an answer to our history of systemic injustice.
In contrast, Bob Woodson is incensed by what he sees as the cultivation of a destructive victim mentality. He boldly appears on Fox News regularly to rail against the left and its obsession with race, and he led a group of Black scholars to create the 1776 Project in response to the New York Times’ 1619 Project. (Woodson’s project precedes and is separate from Trump’s commission of the same name.) Interestingly, Woodson is also a former civil rights activist but veered away from the movement’s racial focus to one emphasizing economic intervention. I know nothing of Bob Lupton’s politics, but I can tell you that when pressed about the failures of the welfare state, he responds that the Church should focus on fixing its own efforts first. And while Brian Fikkert’s criticism of helping that hurts has sent church mission boards across the nation into a tailspin of reevaluation, Fikkert ascribes some of our failures to our uniquely American individualism and materialism. He asks whether our vision for our poor neighbors is simply to invite them into the “unhappy growth” that we experience in the middle and upper classes.
The great lesson in this hodge-podge of thinkers and practitioners is that when we do on-the-ground work with the poor, we don’t have to be ideologically pure. At LOVEtheLOU, a survey of our staff and board would turn up no particular political agenda whatsoever. My guess is that the convinced leftist starts to get less and less excited about government programs when she sees the way they trap neighbors and compete with the healthier paths on offer. A left-leaning friend shared with me recently how he met with the heads of a major teachers’ union and the group seemed offended that he was helping to start a private Christian school in one of the worst neighborhoods in the country. He could only think, “But who else is going to teach our babies how to read?” At the same time, the staunch right-winger will certainly not be able to avoid talk about race, police brutality, and historical injustice, and she might want to leave out who she voted for when chatting with neighbors. The upshot here is that this is practical work, with real people in a real place, not a set of abstract ideas to debate about. John Perkins can call it social justice and Bob Woodson can call it social entrepreneurship, but they’ll do very similar things.
I even have to ask myself, an unapologetic member of the liberty movement, about the role of markets. Neighborhood stabilization isn’t a matter of free markets at work; it’s a matter of civil society at work. Markets can solve lots of problems, but they can’t solve the most fundamental ones—those involving family and community. In fact, healthy markets rely on these institutions far more than we often admit. One important goal, however, is to get people included in market exchange who have lost their “in.” As John Perkins puts it, our neighbors need “Jesus and a job!”
To emphasize the role of civil society is not to downplay the trenchant critique of the state coming from classical-liberal free marketeers. The point isn’t just that the state got in the way of market exchange, but that by doing so the state destroyed decades of social capital, devastating communities in every major city in America. It’s not so much that the market solves everything as that the state causes lots of problems that it then cannot solve. So in the end, it’s civil society for the win. And since I’ve shared several of Lucas’ rebukes from his neighbors, I’ll share his rebuke of me. When I announced excitedly to him that I was getting a chance to speak about the neighborhood stabilization model all over the country, he looked me dead in the eye and said, “Remember, Rachel—this is Jesus work.” Neighborhood stabilization isn’t a “microwave” solution, fast and easy. That’s why we so often choose toxic charity instead. Those who enter in must not only have a radical love for their neighbors but also a deep store of grace upon which to draw. I know a few of these wonderful Jesus people. But we need many, many more to answer the call.
