New Pathways to Prosperity

"Pathways to Prosperity" is an innovative and more effective way of approaching poverty. Working with people who are directly impacted by poverty -- including the organizations they interact with -- we are seeking to better understand the real trade-offs in our policy decisions. Our findings and conclusions include: 1. Poverty in Minnesota is a Catch-22: What you need most is what you don't have - money and connections - and the legal pathways to get more money and connections force you to lose more resources than you gain through increased earnings. 2. Rather than support pathways to independence, the incentives in government policies to address poverty actually create more of a series of barriers that create a bureaucratic maze that has no exit for many who are in poverty. 3. We need a discussion about distribution. Much of the rhetoric that has grown out of the last 40 years of a program-based approach to poverty suggests that current poverty policies are in place to achieve a "redistribution" of resources. This assumes that there is a valid, principled distribution of resources before any "redistribution" takes place. For more information about this project, contact Bob DeBoer at bdeboer[at]citizensleague.org.