Support the InstituteCommunity-Based Poverty Initiative
For generations, poverty has been accepted as part of the daily reality for individuals and families across our nation. The Community-Based Poverty Initiative begins with a different premise: it does not have to be.
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 instead of treating the symptoms, we address the causes?
CBPI asks what happens when residents of a community, as well as the organizations and groups in or near to it, come together with one shared objective: to create meaningful pathways toward economic mobility and stability for every person who lives there.
How the model works
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.
Use local data and lived experience to identify the barriers most responsible for limiting economic stability and opportunity.
Bring together institutions, residents, funders, employers, and civic leaders with relevant resources, authority, and relationships.
Build practical responses around the actual obstacles facing people in that community — not around institutional silos.
Define success before implementation and track whether the work is producing meaningful improvement in people’s lives.
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
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.
Give young people practical experience earning, saving, investing, and building something of their own — before adulthood.
Use underused community space to reduce one major barrier to food entrepreneurship: affordable access to compliant commercial facilities.
Coordinate local institutions around the concrete obstacles that can keep new residents from full economic participation.
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.
Anchor institutions can help create the conditions for a CBPI to take root — bringing resources, relationships, convening power, and a commitment to measurable outcomes.
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