Families Helping Families Escape Poverty

Ryan Messmore / July 21, 2011

Last week (and again yesterday in a follow-up article) The New York Times featured the poverty-fighting work of the Family Independence Initiative (FII). Founded by Maurice Lim Miller in 2001, FII is a nonprofit, community-based organization that helps working poor families escape poverty by encouraging and rewarding personal initiative and mutual support.

On its Web site, FII displays a heading that reads, “Recreating the conditions under which generation after generation of Americans secured a future for their children and communities.” What are those historic conditions? According to Miller, they include personal initiative, shared capital, and a sense of community. (more…)