At the base of the pyramid with Paul Polak (Part I of II)

This entry is about global extreme poverty. It looks at solutions that may have implications about homelessness in the U.S. which is where Paul Polak's interest in poverty began.

Paul Polak is in his mid seventies, witty and funny, and has an old school charm that is engaging and even comforting as he throws his revolutionary ideas and stunning facts at you. If they made a Paul Polak doll I would buy one. A psychologist by training, Paul has spent the last 25+ years working at alleviating extreme poverty for those living at the "base of the pyramid (BOP)" and released a book in 2008 called, Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail. I heard him speak at a breakout session at Pop!Tech.

The Base (or bottom) of the Pyramid is an expression popularized in C.K. Prahalad's The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits (2005). The BOP is the 4 billion people, the majority of human beings, that together make up a huge potential market. Prahalad believes "if we stop thinking of the poor as victims or as a burden and start recognizing them as resilient and creative entrepeneurs and value-conscious consumers, a whole new world of opportunity will open up" for both poor people and businesses. He adds that serving the BOP will "demand innovations in technology, products/services, and business models, and require large firms to work collaboratively with NGOs and local government." This collabrative approach is a big part of IA's Accelerator Expedition.

Polak is all about the BOP. The NGO he founded, IDE, has helped 17 million people out of extreme poverty in 25 years. Its approach is to apply business models to help extremely poor entrepeneurs with innovative design of their products and to creatively and effectively bring those products to market.

He believes that there needs to be a revolution in how multinational corporations design and market to people at the BOP. In his Wed. presentation, after Bunker Roy showed the amazing work and ingenuity of poor, illiterate women, young and old, and others were doing at the Barefoot College, Polak asked, "What if we had a million amazing barefoot people, and designed a package that a multinational corporation develop as an offering to them as franchisees? What if you franchised these 1 million folks and had a product they could sell to poor people. There would be money to be made for investors, for the franchisees, and products that could help the poorest people out of poverty (e.g., efficient lighting, watering systems for small farmers, cheaper electricity, etc.)

"We need a revolution where you can create a revenue stream for the poor person and the parent company," Paul exclaimed. He talked about combining vital products with "the ruthless pursuit of affordability" for true sustainables solutions. So, embrace the profit model and we'll create a true revolution when big business enters the market place for poor people because it makes money. Once there exists a workable model, the marketplace responds and soon big corporations start tweaking products that have a real benefit to poor consumers. The world runs on bottom line process, he says.

For part II of II of this blog click here.

Identifying High-Cost High-Need Homeless People by Dan Flaming

My colleagues and I at the Economic Roundtable in Los Angeles, along with the L.A. Co. Chief Executive Office, recently released a study titled, "Tools for Identifying High-Cost, High-Need Homeless Persons." This paper provides tools for identifying homeless individuals with acute needs, the highest public costs when homeless, and the greatest reduction in public costs when housed.

We analyzed 10,193 homeless, destitute single adults in Los Angeles County – 1,007 of whom exited homelessness by entering supportive housing and were able to link records for these individuals across multiple public agencies, providing crucial information about their characteristics and the public costs for health, mental health, justice system, and welfare services they used. Supportive housing is permanent, affordable housing with on-site case management and additional on-site, or readily available, services such as health, mental health and substance abuse rehabilitation.

When we rank the overall population of homeless single adults by their public costs and break them into ten groups of equal size (deciles), we find that most have comparatively low public costs (an average of $710 per month). But the most expensive ten percent is an average of $8,083 per month, because of extensive use of hospitals and medical and mental health jails in that group. This ten percent of accounts for 56 percent of all public costs for homeless single adults.

When information about a person’s recent history is available, it is possible to combine multiple characteristics of a homeless adult to estimate his or her likelihood of being in the highest decile. No single characteristic defines the tenth cost decile, but by using combinations of key characteristics it is possible to identify these individuals with reasonable certainty. That is useful information for both the homeless person and the public entity working to help him or her.

We developed two tools for combining multiple characteristics to identify high need individuals. The first is a look-up table that shows results from profiling groups within the study population based on seven characteristics and determining the proportion of each group that is in the tenth cost decile, as well as in the combined ninth and tenth deciles. The second is a calculating tool derived from statistical analysis that uses sixteen pieces of information to determine the probability that an individual is in the highest cost decile. You can access these Excel spreadsheet tool by clicking here.

There were some surprises that resulted from this study. I was most surprised by the range of variation in public costs for homeless individuals, with over half getting by with minimal subsistence-level help. Also surprising was the level and frequency of crises that engage the attention of hospitals and jails in the lives of the individuals with the highest public costs. Their lives are very precarious without housing and greatly stabilized with housing.

Our study also has seven major conclusions and recommended action steps. Please visit the Economic Roundtable website to download the full report as well as the tools we created.

Daniel Flaming is the President of the Economic Roundtable in Los Angeles.

Second photo by Ed Yourdon.

What, Me Homeless? by Delmark Goldfarb

According to statistics, I am living way below the poverty line. I might not have known this without those good ol’ numbers. These statistics help me gain a reflection of myself in accordance to a standard of measure I might not have known otherwise.

Homeless? What does that mean? Is it the opposite of “homed?”

I thought I was just like everybody else...I tote around a laptop computer, and a cell phone and I have a taste for triple espressos. But I don’t have one of those roof-topped structures filled with furniture, gizmos, closets, windows and a doorway.

I’m portable.

My ancestors were nomads.

Nevertheless, I’m one of those persons who listens to such descriptive words and attempts to forge them into meaningful thought. When I think of “home,” I imagine a comfort zone wherein one feels most relaxed, at ease and in tune with the immediate environment. I believe that many people feel “at home” for the most part when they are partaking of their most rewarding activity, be it the workshop, the playing field, on stage or quite frequently a particular place of reflection such as a golf course or fishing hole.

If it weren’t for those statistics, I would never have applied the term “homeless” to myself. But a lot of us are getting snared by those numbers as of late. A wave of layoffs and foreclosures has introduced many hard-working people to study up on their couch-surfing skills. Even those with jobs are taking advantage of food banks and thrift stores.

One statistic that does come to mind when trying to get a handle on how times are changing is the fact that a majority of college attendees now return to their parents’ house upon graduation. Does camping out with Mom and Dad absolve the grown child of the negative sting carried by the term “homeless?”

I grew up under the influence of the ‘60s, in the era of “Route 66,” Kerouac’s “Dharma Bums,” and television shows such as “The Fugitive,” where the protagonist could ramble coast-to-coast picking up odd jobs here and there as they explored new vistas while mingling with people and cultures otherwise unknown to them.

We called it “day labor.” Show up in a town someplace, find the nearest factory, farm or warehouse and dig into some up-close-and-personal sweat equity. A day’s work earned a day’s pay, which would usually be enough to buy some food, rent a room and/or buy some gasoline if need be.

The secret was to simply keep going forward, keeping the momentum going and the wind in your sails. If you landed in some miserable sweat shop, then you made the best of it and got the heck out of there. In this manner you learned about those not so lucky, who’d be left behind in the life you’d only had a taste of.

Some would call this a way to learn to “count your blessings.” I just saw it as a reality-based standard of measure. Sort of like a politicians’ breezy “how am I doing?” quip. We can figure it out for ourselves if our eyes are open and our minds free.

“Homeless?” From what angle does it appear that way? Your perspective might not match mine. But that’s okay with me. I’m on the move.

Songwriter, bicyclist, movie extra, photographer, grandfather, deltiologist and coast-to-coast portable man, Delmark Goldfarb is known for his activism and good humor. He founded an annual food drive/music festival now in its twenty-third year (Waterfront Blues Festival), which has raised tons of donated items and millions of dollars for food banks. He is featured in the newly-released jug band documentary "Chasin' Gus' Ghost" and appears on the Give Us Your Poor compilation CD (Appleseed Recordings) accompanied on harmonica by John Sebastian.

Do the rights thing? by Keith Bender

Do the right thing, I've heard people say this like some mantra that guarantee's the desired outcome. As if you can always know what that is? The right thing to do is based on what? Some spiritual connection threading its way through our reality helping those who ask? Or boring ethics we ignored in school? Maybe it’s a new form of wishing people good luck when we really don't know what else to say. More probably, I hope it's an indication that we are advocating for behavior that we all deem is acceptable. Like putting people and the planet first before profits and other things like that.

Doing the Human Rights thing takes a little more knowledge than the ever-pleasing but self-centered world renown sentence nearly everyone can blurt out..... that pursuit of happiness thing. The proper context allows us to reclaim and gather our strength away from the noise we live with in our heads, competing forces struggling for our attention. When was the last time you took time to review your rights and a little history surrounding their creation? A tour of Wikipedia may very well restore some hope in humanity if you are currently feeling disenfranchised or outcast by the Financial Racism this consumer oriented object addicted society has nurtured. You know the one I mean. The place where no place is okay if you don't have an address with legit sleeping quarters attached to it. Where you know something’s wrong but you just can't put your finger on it. The place where the Police enforce property rights as precedent over human needs.

"WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF EVIDENT. THAT ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL,

THAT THEY ARE ENDOWED BY THEIR CREATOR WITH CERTAIN UNALIENABLE RIGHTS,

THAT AMONG THESE ARE LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF SAFETY AND HAPPINESS."

George Mason in the Virginia Declaration of Human Rights, Article 1 uses "the pursuit of Safety and Happiness." Thomas Jefferson used the combined reference again in his Rough Draft of the Declaration of Independence. Safety somehow gives way to Life and Liberty along the way and by the time it reaches Madison's desk we cover the uncovered expanse of human needs and rights in the line:

SHALL NOT BE CONSTRUED TO DENY OR DISPARAGE OTHERS RETAINED BY THE PEOPLE.

The "Others" is rights not spelled out for reasons obvious once the context of enumeration is understood. We pride ourselves in response to everyday crisis. Begin to falter when major catastrophe like Katrina or 9/11 come along and Chronic problems of safety like Homelessness seem to somehow provide a negative payback we can use to feel more fortunate about as we play the consumer game described at the Story of Stuff.

The American Dream needs its counterpart, The American NightMare? NOT!!! As polite as I can be I admit to being one of those Financial Racists I complained about earlier. A denial mechanism? A way to allow or permit this behavior to continue while I went about my life unaffected by and disengaged from feelings that would have told me something is really wrong here. Too caught up in the CAPITALISM game to realize that falling off the playing board had no real way back.

If Ending Homelessness is really our goal then like a Gold miner knowing that you have to clear a route by blasting away rock, our last 10 feet that stand in the way of the gold, the Safety clarification, is that rock needing blasting. This clarification of safety as a right must be seen as a mandate. It really is time we did the right thing for our homeless.

Keith Bender lives in West Springfield, VA where he is a writer, blogger, advocate, and "new wave old hippy." He previously was a realtor and owner of a homestaging business. Keith was recently homeless for over a year.

History and Homelessness by Howard Zinn

Historian, teacher, author Howard Zinn died Wednesday, January 27, 2010 at the age of 87.  Mr. Zinn was a scholar advisor to Give US Your Poor for the planning process of the documentary film by the same name about homelessness in the United States.  Below is an excerpt of the statement he submitted to the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities in support of that project (we worked on sections together, any clunky stuff is clearly mine). We post now in remembrance and appreciation of his work and generosity. - JM

BY HOWARD ZINN:  ...I have always been interested in examining history from the perspective of the rank and file. Most history books give the perspective from the top: from elected officials, industrialists, people of power and importance. Indeed, the sources are much more available for this approach: journals kept by educated men and women, documents, official biographies.

But there are also sources, though more difficult to find, which represent the conditions of life, and even the thinking, of those at the bottom end of society. It is the history of these people which needs very much to be told. And while important decisions are made by the authorities in any culture, the momentum for these decisions usually comes from below, from the movements of oppressed people.

The "homeless" are among the most neglected of this underclass, those left out of traditional histories of the United States. We get rare glimpses of these people in history through a folk song or a biographer's description of George Washington passing the homeless on a trip through Philadelphia. The impression is left that there were no "homeless" until the Great Depression, that this temporary condition of widespread poverty was remedied by the New Deal, and that it only reappeared in the 1980s. That view would lead us away from understanding the structural base of homelessness, as a permanent phenomenon in the nation's life. The result would be complacency and inaction.

The Declaration of Independence says we are all created equal, that we all have rights that cannot be taken from us - the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But these rights have never been applied to the homeless, and this film should lead people to think about that. The right to pursue happiness is meaningless if people do not have the resources for a happy life: food, a home, health care, satisfying work.

The Bill of Rights operates differently for rich and poor. The right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure is different for a family living in a mansion than for a family living in a housing project, or out on the street. We should look beyond the Bill of Rights to the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which says that all people, everywhere in the world, are entitled to work and decent wages, to holidays and vacations, to food, clothing, housing and medical care, to education, to child care and maternal care.

There have been books, articles and films that examine homelessness. But they have not had a significant effect on the national consciousness. A film on homelessness in America would make an important contribution to the history of the underrepresented in American society.

My role as advisor is to help ensure that "Give Us Your Poor", as a historical work, presents the perspective of those Americans who have been struggling simply to have a place to live. My hope is that the film will raise consciousness about homelessness, thus leading viewers away from the notion that it is an acceptable part of American life. By looking at homelessness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we may learn something about how to deal with it today.

This film is a humanities project because it is steeped in history. It is not simply the history of public policy, but the history of people struggling for a place to lay their head and fight for dignity. It is the history of the American people and their answers over time to the question: "How do we treat our fellow citizens when they are most vulnerable?" To answer this question is to get at the heart of a humanist approach to the problems of society.

For more information on Howard Zinn's career and life visit http://www.howardzinn.org.

Lynne Twist and the Opportunity within the Economic Crisis

Lynne Twist is the author of The Soul of Money and the co-founder of the global NGO, The Pachamama Alliance.  The Pachamama Alliance is a partnership between the indigenous Achuar Tribe of the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest and people worldwide working to save the Ecuadorian rainforest and preserve the Achuar culture.

Lynne talks and writes often about the profound abundance in life that we often overlook as we instead focus on our scarcity. It is a monetary perspective as well as a spiritual one and impacts our actions and happiness.

She recently created a short video talking about this idea as it relates to the current global economic crisis. I encourage you to check it out (it's about 3 minutes long) by clicking on the link at the bottom of this blog entry. 

In the video, Lynne says, “If we can see that what's happening is a truing, is a recalibration, it helps us see how to deal with it on a personal basis.  It doesn't mean it's not going to be painful; it doesn't mean that there's not suffering; it doesn't mean that we shouldn't be paying close attention to how we use money."

“But if we look on a larger scale, if we step back from the personal trauma, the fear, that we're all caught in and that the media's caught in, and see that we're living at a time of enormous excess that has created financial structures and systems that are inappropriate and completely unsustainable and now they're falling apart, we’ll know that, at the end of this, we're all going to be better for it, because we're going to be in a truthful, more accurate, more integrous relationship with ourself, with money and with the resources on this planet.  We can get through this.”

This has great implications for addressing epidemic homelessness, which has been for decades now the carnage of an unsustainable system.  Click here to view the video

Lynne has been a great friend to Give US Your Poor.

The Gift of Music & Oneself at Christmas: Michael Severens at PIP Shelter

The week before Christmas 2009, Give US Your Poor organized a performance by classical cellist Michael Severens of the l`Orquesta Sinfonica de la Universidad de Guanajuato, Mexico at the PIP Shelter in Worcester, MA. Michael grew up in Worcester down the street from PIP and was home visiting from Mexico for the holidays. Attendance was sparse, the weather was bone chilling outside, but Severens was in fine form. He had played the night before at Worcester's Longest Night service and was moved to tears hearing about the people who lost their lives in 2009 due to homelessness, proof that homelessness is not only a moral tragedy for US all but a death sentence for too many. A number of PIP guests that evening thanked Severens for taking the time to come and perform and for thinking of them. Many talked of their own musical talent. They walked him to the door, thanking him again and again, and wishing him Merry Christmas. I was with him and struck deeply again that I was off to a warm home and these new friends were off to a crowded emergency shelter for the night, for the week, for the year.

Many thanks to the staff and guests at PIP shelter for welcoming Michael and his cello that cold night in Worcester, and many thanks to Mr. Severens for reminding me of the meaning of giving at Christmas. May we all carry that forth throughout the year! Peace out.

PIP Shelter is part of the South Middlesex Opportunity Council (S.M.O.C.)