Community-Based Poverty Initiative
What would it take to make poverty history — one community at a time?
For generations, poverty has been treated as one of society’s most persistent realities. The Community-Based Poverty Initiative begins with a different premise: it does not have to be.
The question behind the initiative
For the Bergel Institute, that question is not an accusation. It is an invitation to examine whether the way our efforts are organized is producing the outcomes we should expect.
Poverty rarely reflects one obstacle. Employment, housing, transportation, education, health, childcare, financial access, safety, and social connection can reinforce one another — often within the same community.
What if the challenge is not simply a lack of effort, but a lack of alignment?
Why we believe change is possible
Opportunity is shaped by the conditions around us.
Research on economic mobility and intergenerational poverty points toward a powerful idea: where people live, the institutions they encounter, and the opportunities available around them can influence life outcomes over time.
Opportunity varies by community.
Economic mobility can differ substantially from one neighborhood to another. Place is not simply where poverty is experienced; it can shape the pathways available to move beyond it.
Barriers compound.
Housing, education, employment, health, transportation, safety, family stability, and financial opportunity interact. Solving one obstacle while ignoring the others may not be enough.
Communities already hold resources.
Businesses, schools, nonprofits, government, faith communities, funders, healthcare institutions, civic leaders, and residents each hold pieces of the capacity needed to create opportunity.
The moonshot
The goal is not to manage poverty better. The goal is to overcome it.
CBPI asks what becomes possible when a community deliberately organizes its people, institutions, resources, and opportunities around one shared objective: creating a meaningful pathway toward economic stability and mobility for every person who lives there.
Ambition without evidence is wishful thinking. Evidence without ambition is not enough.
How the model works
Turn shared ambition into coordinated action.
CBPI is designed as a disciplined community process: understand what is holding people back, align the actors with the capacity to respond, act, measure what changes, and adapt until progress becomes visible.
Understand
Use local data and lived experience to identify the barriers most responsible for limiting economic stability and opportunity.
Align
Bring together institutions, residents, funders, employers, and civic leaders with relevant resources, authority, and relationships.
Act
Build practical responses around the actual obstacles facing people in that community — not around institutional silos.
Measure
Define success before implementation and track whether the work is producing meaningful improvement in people’s lives.
Adapt
Keep what works, change what does not, and use learning to strengthen the next round of community action.
No single institution controls the conditions that shape poverty. CBPI is built around the opposite idea: a community can align across those boundaries around the outcomes that matter most.
The CBPI Action Guide
What could community-level action actually look like?
The Action Guide translates the model into practical starting points. The examples are not prescriptions. They are prompts for identifying unused capacity, removing specific barriers, and building locally relevant pathways to opportunity.
Launch a Youth Wealth-Building Program
Give young people practical experience earning, saving, investing, and building something of their own — before adulthood.
See possible action steps
- Real skills: prioritize hands-on business experience and financial capability.
- Seed funding: create small micro-grants through a simple local pitch process.
- Long-term wealth: introduce saving, investing, and compound growth early.
- Mentorship: connect young people with experienced local business leaders.
Create a Shared Commercial Kitchen
Use underused community space to reduce one major barrier to food entrepreneurship: affordable access to compliant commercial facilities.
See possible action steps
- Find unused space: explore churches, community centers, or institutional kitchens.
- Build compliance in: involve the appropriate local agencies from the beginning.
- Keep access realistic: consider sliding-scale or subsidized use.
- Add business support: pair space with mentorship, marketing, and financial guidance.
Help New Neighbors Build Economic Stability
Coordinate local institutions around the concrete obstacles that can keep new residents from full economic participation.
See possible action steps
- Create a trusted hub: establish a reliable place to navigate local resources and systems.
- Address language and credit: connect workplace-specific language support with financial-system navigation.
- Recruit employers: build entry pathways with local businesses.
- Use peer mentorship: connect newer residents with established community members.
A moonshot requires anchors
CBPI will not be built by one organization. It will be built by communities willing to align around a goal large enough to matter.
We are looking for anchor partners.
Anchor institutions and funders can help create the conditions for a CBPI to take root — bringing resources, relationships, credibility, expertise, convening power, and a commitment to measurable outcomes.
- Help convene the right people around a shared community objective.
- Support local assessment, implementation, measurement, and learning.
- Open access to expertise, networks, facilities, capital, or opportunity.
- Help demonstrate what coordinated community action can achieve.
We believe persistent poverty can become a problem communities no longer accept as inevitable. CBPI is an effort to prove what becomes possible when they organize accordingly.
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