Robert Woodson—Down But Not Out

Philadelphia native Robert Woodson was born in 1937 and raised by a single mother after his father died at a young age. Woodson led a troubled youth and eventually dropped out of high school. At the age of 17, however, he joined the Air Force and began to get his life back on track. After returning to school to earn his GED and a college degree, he began working with juvenile delinquents and eventually earned his masters in Social Work from the University of Pennsylvania.

Robert Woodson—Shifting Right Towards Empowerment

Despite his passion for the poor, Woodson quickly became disenchanted with the anti-poverty institutions of the day. Irked by liberalism and bureaucracy, Woodson teamed up with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) as a research fellow. The think tank armed with knowledge he had been searching for—namely, how to help people empower themselves.

An action-oriented person, Woodson left AEI in 1981 and founded the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise (NCNE) for the advancement of the poor neighborhoods through empowerment and self-management. Since its founding, the program has provided “training and capacity-building technical assistance to more than 2600 leaders of community-based groups in 39 states” (NCNE website). In reality, the impact of NCNE was far greater still because it pioneered a new, neighborhood-centric model for tackling poverty. In recognition of Woodson’s innovative work, the MacArthur Foundation awarded him their prestigious “Genius Grant” in 1990.

Robert Woodson—A Public Partner

Over the years, Woodson has remained incredibly active in the public sector, working alongside dozens of grassroots groups in various capacities. Violence-Free Zone, a Woodson-driven project aiming to reduce youth violence, is effectively reducing violence in 32 of the nation’s most troubled schools, with sites in Atlanta, Baltimore, Dallas, Milwaukee, and Richmond, VA. Woodson also serves on the boards of the American Association of Enterprise Zones, the Commission on National and Community Service, and the Commonwealth Foundation.

Woodson has detailed his empowerment approach to poverty in several notable publications including The Triumphs of Joseph: How Today's Community Healers are Reviving Our Streets and Neighborhoods.

• Mischaracterizing the Poor

  The idea of empowering neighborhood people is a radical idea because it’s not something that’s understood on either the left or the right of the political center. I think Bill Bennet, the former secretary of education, summarized it beautifully. He said “When liberals look at poor people they see a sea of victims and when conservatives look at poor people they see a sea of aliens.

• The Poverty Industrial Complex

  There is a poverty industrial complex. You’ve got huge numbers of people who profit off our differences. You see, if you are problem oriented, you can write about the problem, you can lecture about the problem, you can consult on the problem. You can do everything but solve the problem.

• Accountability

  There will always be a resistance to measuring results as long as the people who are in power to serve poor people have perverse incentives to maintain people in poverty. To me, corrupt leadership is when you don’t have to suffer the consequences of your own decisions.

• Creating Win-Win Partnerships

  The race grievance industry believes in zero-sum solutions – in order for blacks to gain whites must lose; in order for poor people to prosper business must lose. But if you look at it from a positive sum solution to say, “How can we all benefit?” the way most faith-based groups operate, then you look for opportunities to think and act outside of the box where you say “How can we partner?

• Government Failure

  The reason government has failed is because they only deal with the secular, material side of people.

• Commonsense

  The big challenge we face is how to make common sense commonplace again.

• American Welfare

  Prior to the 1960s, the black community, even though we had no political rights, didn’t have voting rights, were not represented in local government and some of us being lynched everyday. Even in the presence of all those economic and social injustices, the black marriage rate in 1930 to 1940 was higher than in the white community. That 82 percent of all black families had a man and a woman raising children. The out-of-wedlock birth was something like 12 or 15 percent and that was considered a scandal. So, but what happened in 1960 when government intervened with the poverty programs a major paradigm shift occurred. And that is: government began to intervene and 80 percent of the money that it invested went not to institutions and communities but to a service industry. And so 82 percent or 80 percent of the money that government spent on helping poor people does not go to poor people but to professional service providers. They ask not which problems are solvable, but which problems are fundable this year, and as a consequence of this we had the poverty programs. We provided perverse incentives for maintaining people in poverty. So that if you are running an agency to serve poor people, you get paid for the number of people you purportedly serve not how many problems you solve. Also welfare policy made a major shift and contributed to the decimation of the family, as well, because welfare policy said if you drop out of school, don’t work, have babies the government will pay you. And the more children you have the more we’ll pay you. Even the public housing policies mitigated against healthy families. For instance, if you and I had an increase in salary our rent or mortgage payment doesn’t go up, but if you are a resident in public housing your income is, your rent is indexed to your income so that’s a disincentive for families to form. So there, it was a perfect storm of government policies, as well as welfare policies. Where now 30 percent of black families have a man and a woman raising children and it is true not only for the black community but for other groups as well. So obviously government has injured with the helping hand.