Family Independence Initiative in the NYT

Back in February we hosted Maurice Lim Miller of the Family Independence Initiative at an event (“Social Innovation and Community Solutions for a New War on Poverty“) that discussed the FII and the innovative work Maurice and his team were doing to fight poverty. FII is a family and community directed approach that tries to build on the strengths of families in need and lets them have great sway in deciding how they want to chart a path to improving their lives and circumstances.

Yesterday, FII was showcased in the Opinionator blog on the New York Times’ site. David Bornstein does as good a job of communicating the essence of the program as I’ve seen. Here’s how he outlines FII:

They started with 25 families in three cohorts — eight African American families, six Salvadoran refugee families and 11 Iu Mien families from Laos. The latter were all on welfare. FII asked them to write down their goals, gave each a computer and enlisted them to fill in a questionnaire each month that tracked changes in things like income, assets, debts, health, education, skills, social networks and civic engagement.

They offered families $30 for every success they reported up to a maximum of $200 per month. (FII pays for reporting, not for specific actions, a different anti-poverty approach known as “conditional cash transfers” that we have reported on in Fixes.) Lim Miller reasoned that if he were to hire a consultant to collect this data, it would cost three or four times more. The families agreed to meet with an FII liaison every three months for an audit. Anything they reported — a pay increase, a doctor visit, an improvement in a child’s grades — had to be documented.

Most important, families had to agree to meet as a group at least once a month in a confidential setting to discuss their goals and any issues they deemed important. FII didn’t guide the agenda and its liaisons did not act as facilitators. They established the structure and backed off, creating a vacuum for families to take the lead…

We believe FII has a lot of potential to create some positive change and momentum for low-income families and that it offers the asset building community and those interested in improving the well-being of those families a terrific learning opportunity. Kudos to the Times for running this piece, and it looks like there’s going to be some follow-up coverage as well. We’ll look forward to that, and to more people learning about this fascinating experiment.