Maurice Lim Miller wins MacArthur Genius Award

Maurice Lim Miller, founder and CEO of the Family Independence Initiative is one of 23 winners of the MacArthur Fellowship, or the “Genius Awards,” for 2012.

Maurice is a friend and colleague of ours and this is richly deserved recognition. It took some of us here time to wrap our heads around the work that FII does, and it doesn’t fit into one sentence well, but Maurice’s characteristic humility and a bit of that genius slips through in the statement released by FII when he says,

“It’s a testament to the families FII has worked with over the last decade. I hope this attention spurs our country to rethink how we approach economic hardship and mobility. My work shows that poor people are broke, not broken. When we create environments for people to work together and solve their own problems and provide resources based on their initiative, families have a deep capacity to transform their lives.”

Congratulations to Maurice, his team, and the families who’ve worked with them these past years. If you want to learn more about Maurice’s experience empowering families you can read the paper he wrote and we published last year, “The Uphill Battle to Scale an Innovative Antipoverty Approach” or read Anne Stuhldreher and Rourke O’Brien’s take on Maurice’s work, “The Family Independence Initiative: A New Approach to Help Families Exit Poverty.” Or maybe you’re a visual or aural learner, in which case, you can watch video of the event we held in February 2011, Social Innovation and Community Solutions for a New War on Poverty.

No matter how what medium you use to learn about Maurice and FII, you’re likely to come away impressed. Congratulations again!