LESSONS FROM THE LEAST OF THESE

The author approach the topic of poverty from the perspective of a radical pragmatist. 8% of his closest friends are ex-something, because he have worked most of his professional life in the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, an organization he founded 34 years ago. Prior to that, he was involved in the Civil Rights Movement. Then in the 1960s, he was mugged by reality and joined the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). He went there to work with Peter Berger and Bob Nesbitt, who were studying the role of mediating structures or intermediary institutions like families, churches, and other voluntary associations. They asked me to go in-residence at AEI to write about these subjects from the perspective of a practitioner, someone on the front lines in low-income neighborhoods finding solutions. It is also true that people did not associate poverty and pathology until the 1960s. The black community is often a moral barometer of the health of the nation.