Giving Ventures Podcast: Episode 104 – America’s Poverty Trap

This transcript has been AI-generated and lightly edited for clarity. Some inaccuracies may remain.

Peter Lipsett: By any objective measure, people around the world are richer, significantly richer in a lot of cases than they were even 10 years ago, certainly 50, 100 years ago. There’s the old trope that a plumber in Peoria today is better off than King Louis at Versailles. And yet we continue to fight the so-called war on poverty. We see poverty all around us. We align our charitable giving to help the homeless, to feed people and clothe them and support food banks. We know there are problems and yet these solutions that we throw out there don’t seem to solve things. The answer seems elusive. Several years ago, some of you listening and watching may have seen the film Poverty, Inc., which was put out by our friends at the Acton Institute, a great documentary that was a real indictment of the global aid industrial complex, if you will, the food and humanitarian aid supporting people in the poorest places on earth. And the efforts that are part of that complex aim to alleviate poverty. And yet, as the film made clear, in many cases, those handouts only make it worse. Well, now the same team is at it again, turning the lens inward at the United States to try to figure out the problems of poverty here at home and the solutions that hopefully are making it better and often maybe making it worse. And so I am thrilled today to have my friend Michael Matheson Miller from the Acton Institute. He was the director and producer of Poverty Inc. and also ran the corresponding educational components that were around it. By title, he is the Chief of Strategic Initiatives at Acton Institute and the Director of the Center for Social Flourishing and now has a new credit to add to his IMDB database, which is Director and Producer of the new film, Poverty Trap: How Big Plans to End Poverty Broke the American Dream. So today we’re going to talk about how donors should be thinking about poverty alleviation around the world and back here at home. How do we alleviate human suffering in a way that really matters? And what can our philanthropy do and what shouldn’t it do?

Michael Matheson Miller: Thank you.

Peter Lipsett: Toward that effort. Michael, great to see you.

Michael Matheson Miller: Thanks, Peter, for having me on your show. I’m honored. You know, I’ve been around DonorsTrust and used DonorsTrust for years, so I’m very grateful.

Peter Lipsett: You have, you’ve been a loyal person and part of the family and it’s great. Acton Institute, many people know is a think tank that has this beautiful merger of free markets and advocacy for free markets, along with faith and religion and why that is important too. Very unique, wonderful organization. But what business does a think tank have putting out full feature-length movies?

Michael Matheson Miller: As you know, our mission is to take very seriously morality, religion, theology, ethics, and then economics, entrepreneurship and poverty. And so we look at more things business and how do we think about what’s a flourishing society look like? Individual liberty. How do we think about that? What are the moral, theological and philosophical political roots of freedom and of human flourishing? And so that’s like our core work. And so at Acton, we have an academic journal, the Journal of Markets and Morality, which is very, it’s a peer reviewed journal. It’s academic. We have a magazine called Religion and Liberty, which is much more accessible. We run conferences all over the United States, all over the world. We have a Rome office and we have our big conference called Acton University where each year we have about 900 to a thousand people from 70 to 80 countries come in. It’s a magnificent conference. If your listeners are interested in those things, it’s great. You get a lot of courses to choose from, lots of debate, lots of interesting ideas. And it’s everybody there from high school students to my father before he passed away, used to go until he was about 94 every year. So it’s a great conference from different people all over the world. So I think some of your listeners would like it. So this goes to the question. So why film? Well, part of what we want to do is we want to communicate these complex ideas in various layers. So from an academic journal to data and statistics to in ways that people can understand. And so film really is an important way to do this. And then especially when you think about the question of poverty, this is a very emotionally charged issue. So it’s important for the Acton Institute because, you know, if you think about, if we think free competitive market economies are important for human flourishing and important for human freedom. And I could talk about why, but if it doesn’t help poor people, well, then is it really that good? And if it’s only for like the already wealthy and successful, but doesn’t actually help poor people, then this is where the rubber meets the road. This is where the real question, what’s going to help poor people. And we believe that it’s free competitive market economies grounded in a moral order and taking seriously the idea of justice. And so, how do you communicate those ideas? Well, one of the ways is through story and through argument. And so I mean, so documentary film is, I think it’s a very difficult mode to do it in one sense. But it’s also, I think, the relevant and the best way to do it, especially with questions of poverty that are emotional. And I could give you some examples. I don’t want to go on too long. But I mean, that’s the real thing is like it’s we’re trying to distill complex ideas, argument and stories with experience so that people can say, oh, now I understand in ways I hadn’t seen before. And a lot of the goal of the films that I’ve done is not to close the deal, if that makes sense. Like, so if you’re unsure, if you really want to care for the poor and you help and you’re moved by images of poverty in say Sub-Saharan Africa and the dominant way we think about it is, OK, we’ve got to give foreign aid. We’ve got to give them things that’s got to help.

Peter Lipsett: Hmm.

Michael Matheson Miller: And our argument is, well, actually, that’s not as successful as you think it is. And in fact, sometimes it even creates harm. Well, we can write white papers. We can write arguments. We can do podcasts. But it’s just like me talking against somebody else talking. With a film, we can actually show you the situation. We can have people’s voices who are not generally heard. You don’t hear African entrepreneurs telling you very much about these things. I mean, you know Magatte Wade, she’s unique. She’s an outlier. But most of the entrepreneurs, they’re just regular people building businesses. When you hear a lot of voices in Africa saying, we don’t want aid, aid’s harmful. Aid creates problems. Aid’s part of a poverty industrial complex. Then you think, wait a minute, I haven’t heard that voice. And so the best way to get that voice out is through documentary film. And that’s the business that a think tank has in doing documentary film. And the last thing I’ll say is, the goal of a documentary film is also not to like close the deal or immediately change. It’s in a sense to change the trajectory of thought. So if you think, oh, of course, foreign aid is good. And anybody who doesn’t like foreign aid is clearly like just a hard hearted person. And then you actually hear people saying, well, foreign aid has these difficulties and et cetera. You can start to shift your view and think, oh, I haven’t seen that before. And then that opens you up to other arguments. Now you can listen to an argument in an article or on a podcast that you couldn’t even hear before because that was outside of your kind of possible or plausibility structure of what could be a solid argument. And that’s why we do film. Sorry for the long answer.

Peter Lipsett: No, no, I mean, you know, I’ve been around the donor community for 20 some odd years, right? And there have been film projects that have come and gone and people get excited about them because they’re sexy and flashy. And half of them, maybe more, are complete waste of money. They’re not good uses of money. And I think part of that is exactly what you just said, that your goal with that film isn’t to close the deal, it’s to bend the trajectory. I think that’s a really, really interesting point because a lot of people, good, smart, well-meaning people, think that just by seeing the film, the minds will be changed. And that is not the case. Now, a lot of minds were changed, or at least were open to new thoughts because of Poverty Inc. We could do a whole separate podcast just on Poverty Inc. I don’t want to go too deep into it now, but I encourage people who haven’t seen it, see the film, listen to you talking about it on another podcast. Because I want to get into the US stuff, but it really left a mark. I mean, do you feel that you and the folks at Acton, the people with Poverty Cure that was the educational side of it, do you feel like you bent that trajectory?

Michael Matheson Miller: It’s a very difficult question to know the large effect of your film. I can say we were delighted with the response, Peter. I mean, we played in over 60 film festivals. We won a number of awards. We had people enthusiastic from all over the political spectrum, which is very rare. Michael Moore, the filmmaker, said this film will change the way you think about third world poverty. He gave us prime time in his festival in Traverse City. We had free market economists, people like Russ Roberts had me on his show for Econ Talk. And so we had free marketers. We had, you know, people on the right, people on the left. I mean, it’s kind of funny, like Democrats were like Republicans need to see this and Republicans were like Democrats need to see this. You know, we played in film festivals. I met a very nice lady. She was a journalist in Greece. She’s from a socialist newspaper, socialist newspaper. OK, there’s no like any kind of progressive. And she told me and the director of photography I work with Simon Scionka, it’s not a typical kind of left wing film. It was something different. And I think that that was part of the success we had was we didn’t set out to make a right wing film. We didn’t set out to make a left wing film. We didn’t set out to close the deal. We wanted to reframe the way you think about poverty. And so one of the things I think you go back to documentaries and why they work and why they don’t work is. Well, you know, depending on the argument you’re making, if you’re trying to make an argument, it’s very difficult. If you’re trying to tell a story, it’s hard enough. I mean, doing documentary film is hard. Trust me, I’m suffering through finishing this last one right now. I mean, it’s incredibly difficult. I met somebody the other day that he worked for Marvel. And I met him a couple of months ago. And he said, you know, I worked at Marvel. I did all these narrative films. I made a documentary. He goes, they’re hard. I’m like, I know. Like you think it’s easy, but there’s no script. And you’re just kind of going out there trying to tell a story. And so what happens is you obviously have a point of view. You obviously have an argument and a vision, which I do. And our team does, but I think sometimes we’re trying to close the deal. So you have to go around filters. You have to kind of open up the way you think about it. So for example, if I use the word capitalism in front of a hundred people, 40 people are going to be like, I love capitalism. 40 people are going to like capitalism is the worst thing that’s ever been invented. And then another, you know, 20 people are going to have another, say 10 or different views. So if I say the word capitalism, you already know what you think. Right. So in order for me to discuss, how should we think about creating economic opportunity for the poor? The word capitalism does no good. It doesn’t help you. The only person who used the word capitalism in our film was a clip we used from Bono giving a speech. Right. And so now you can begin to think, OK, well, what’s the problem? So one of the things we argue in this film and we can move on to domestic is that poor people are excluded from the institutions of justice. They don’t have access to private property. It’s hard to register their business. They don’t really have good rule of law. They can’t get their court case heard. And they’re oftentimes stifled by lots of regulation. And so if an economy gets highly, highly regulated by the government and by powerful interest groups, a poor person doesn’t have the social, political and economic context to navigate that system. So they’re locked out. Now, people on the right and people on the left think that’s not fair. Like people on the right don’t like that. They don’t want poor people to be excluded and people on the left don’t want poor people to be excluded. Right. And so this gives now you can say, OK, well, what’s the problem? Now we can think about the problem in a different way from mere right, left categories where poor people become the football that we’re going back and forth with. Right. And so that’s a very simple way of doing it. The last thing I want to say is, you know, when you make film, the other reason that’s connected to this is we were fighting the dominant narrative of foreign aid. And you asked if we had any impact. I don’t know if we had any impact, but I was delighted to see that USAID was questioned when DOGE went through USAID and found all these things. I wasn’t surprised.

Peter Lipsett: All right.

Michael Matheson Miller: And if you watch the film, Poverty Inc, people who worked in international development weren’t surprised because the system, the whole model of economic development is broken. If a model of economic development is fundamentally broken, of course, corruption is going to emerge because the model doesn’t work anyway. Right. And so it all becomes this thing or that thing. So I was very happy to see USAID being challenged. My biggest critique is that everybody was criticizing USAID predominantly because of the corruption. My argument is the predominant reason to critique USAID is the model is fundamentally broken because it actually incentivizes poor countries not to create the institutions of justice that create inclusion for poor people. And so this is why it’s a poverty industry. Now if you’re going to fight foreign aid, who are you fighting? You’re fighting good intentions. Of course we should care for the poor and give them aid. You know, we’re wealthy. You’re fighting massive advertising campaigns. You’re fighting all the organizations that want you to give money and show poor people. And then you’re fighting in our case some of the examples we gave the music industry, right? The ONE Campaign that “We Are the World” song that they redid, the Band Aid Christmas song, you know, it’s Christmas time. There’s no need to be afraid. And I, you know, I have amazing hair. So how is a middle-aged bald man going to say, well, actually, Bono’s point, you know, it doesn’t actually, look at the data. I mean, no one’s going to listen to that. No one. Right. So what we did was we showed the song, we let people actually process the lyrics. And then we had Africans and Haitians and other people comment on it. And now you’re like, golly, I hadn’t thought of it that way. And so, again, that’s the goal is not, you know, now you have to have these 10 positions and policy or these four ideas that you have to hold. No, the goal is to say, my goodness, I’ve never thought about it that way. And now you’re opened up to thinking about things in a new way. The world is incredibly complex. And if we can get people to open up to thinking about things in a new way, now they’re intellectually ready and emotionally ready to hear an argument that they couldn’t hear before. Not because they were bad, not because they were dumb, but because it was outside of their plausibility and they assumed that position was cold, hard-hearted, not helpful. But in fact, we show, no, that position actually aligns with your deepest held beliefs. You want inclusion for the poor. If you want inclusion for the poor, then maybe the answer isn’t what you thought. Maybe it’s something else. Does that make sense? Is that helpful?

Peter Lipsett: That makes sense. But to a certain extent, going international with that is almost easy because it’s easy to stay at the top level and be like, well, of course we want to help. And of course it’s corrupt. And, you know, it’s all these of courses. But it’s far away. It’s distant. Now you’re turning the camera inward to this massive problem of poverty in America, which looks completely different than poverty in Tanzania or Kenya or wherever in Africa.

Michael Matheson Miller: Yeah.

Peter Lipsett: It’s a very fraught topic. It’s very difficult. These are our neighbors instead of this faraway concept. How do you even go about approaching such a fraught big problem as poverty in America? How do you start?

Michael Matheson Miller: Yeah, well, I mean, Peter is super difficult and we’ll see how the film goes. Let me say first that, I think the question of poverty in the United States is different. There are some overlapping similarities, right. And those overlapping similarities is that I think the way we think about poor people in any place is we tend to, not intentionally, we tend to turn them into objects. Objects of our charity, objects of our pity, objects of our compassion, objects of our policy, right? Objects of our help. And so they’re objects instead of the subjects and protagonists of their own story of development. I think that’s one similarity. The second similarity is we have a social engineering notion that if we could just tweak the following things, we can end poverty forever. And so we think, if we can just set these things up, it’ll work. Now, that doesn’t mean there aren’t things that are important in policy. I already said private property, rule of law, ability to engage in trade without undue regulation or burden. Right. Competitive economies that aren’t just run by monopolies or big government, big business collusion. These matter. So I’m not saying they don’t matter. OK. But the idea that planners could socially engineer this jumping out of poverty as, you know, this idea that we could just, you know, even President Clinton talked about this in our film and we have a clip from him talking about this and many others like the idea if we could just jumpstart the economy. We’re going to make the leap into industrialism and everything’s going to work out. Well, there’s also social complexity that oftentimes people ignore. We’re not just, we’re embedded. We’re not just kind of individual agents moving around that can be socially manipulated. There’s deep cultural complexity that we have to take it for granted. So those things I think are very much the same in the United States and in poor developing countries. But the big difference is that in poor countries, people are predominantly poor because they lack private property, rule of law, freedom of association, free exchange. In the United States, you generally have access to that. Now it’s not equal and there’s different things and there’s exclusion to be sure, but relatively speaking, you have access.

Peter Lipsett: On paper, they should have all of those things.

Michael Matheson Miller: Yeah, I mean, and even in reality, relatively speaking, it’s just not the same. OK, so what is it? Well, you know, it’s complex. There’s no single answer. And so part of the problem is we can’t fall prey to the very thing we’re critiquing, right, which is like, oh, if we could just solve this and all work together. But I do think you could say that the fundamental problem is that we have a breakdown of the natural communities that enable people to flourish. And so you have a breakdown of social capital. What’s lacking in the United States is not just economic capital, not just economic opportunity. It is lacking, but also social capital, education, et cetera. These things are broken down. And so I think one of the things that’s happened and this is the subtitle of our film, how big plans to end poverty broke the American dream is that the idea. And this is where there’s a parallel with the developing world. We won World War Two. Let’s win the peace. Let’s create all these government systems and we are going to just rebuild. We’re going to clear slums. We’re going to build public housing. We’re going to create welfare. It’s going to be a ramp off and we’re going to end poverty and there was deep excitement and deep confidence that we could socially engineer our way out of poverty. And what happened in the United States is in many cases, we actually destroyed the natural communities where people flourish and we created a whole system of a breakdown of independence, right? And a breakdown of social capital. So let me just give you some examples. And then I want to talk about dependency because I want us to think about dependency in a very different way than we tend to. OK. And this is one of the things I really learned in talking to a lot of people. We’ve done over 130 interviews and talked to these different people. But let’s go back to the first part. So we did a project called Urban Renewal, which many of your listeners are familiar with. It started in the 40s, but went on through the Great Society. And there’s the idea we’re going to clear slums. There’s going to be slum clearance and we’re going to get rid of all these terrible places where people live. And we’re going to rebuild. We’re going to create public housing. We’re going to create opportunities. We’re going to create Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which started under the Roosevelt administration. And then it goes on until it becomes TANF. So you have these programs that are going to help. So what happened? Well, here’s some stories we talk about in our film. There was a place in Detroit called Black Bottom, two neighborhoods, Black Bottom and Paradise Valley. These are poor, mostly African-American, but not only, communities. And the idea was we’re going to clear them out. So they put the freeway through the middle of it because you need freeways, right? And then they built public housing and all these things. And so these neighborhoods were eradicated. Well, what happened when you eradicated the neighborhood? There were hundreds of businesses, churches, sodalities, private associations, private home ownership, all of these, these not just they were poor places, but they had all these networks. There were growing communities. African American communities, about 49% of urban renewal were African American communities. Bob Woodson talks about, if you look at African American marriage rates, business formation, all these other things, they were high in the 20s, 30s and 40s. And then you have these massive social engineering programs that come in. And they didn’t just destroy the physical place. They destroyed all the networks and intersections. And so all the businesses left. And then you put people in public housing. Now, public housing, your rent is tied to 30% of your income. So if you make more money. If you make more money, what happens? Your rent goes up. If you have a mortgage, Peter, and you make, you get a raise at DonorsTrust. Does your mortgage go up? Like, no, right? But your rent is tied to your income. So you don’t have actually an incentive to make money. Then you bring the. Right, right. Exactly.

Peter Lipsett: And this starts getting into the welfare cliff, the benefits cliff that so many places have talked about and it’s a real pernicious problem.

Michael Matheson Miller: It is a pernicious problem. The benefits cliff was talked about in the second. So now then you live in public housing. Well, let’s talk about benefits cliffs. If you save money, you can get punished for saving. You can lose your benefits. If you get married, there are marriage penalties for the bottom 25 to third of the population. I was talking to a friend. He’s, you know, successful. And I was like, yeah, if you’re married, you get penalized. He’s like, no, you don’t. I get marriage benefits for being married. Like, you do. But if you’re on any assistance, you don’t, you can lose your benefits. If you make too much money, the Georgia Center for Opportunity is very good on this. If you make just a little bit more shocking, I mean, this shocked me, OK, Pete. You make 10, 15, 20 cents more, it can hit you at a cliff where you can lose thousands of dollars of benefits. So people don’t, they’re not stupid as well, they don’t take raises, they quit their jobs, right? They don’t get married. All these things that actually help you get out of poverty, you’re punished if you do. Now back to the public housing, not only do you not own the land, not only are all the normal local businesses gone because they’ve been bulldozed, right? And this is like in hundreds of cities across the United States. Now they did social experiments. They’ve changed now, but they had this long-term impact. If you were married, if you had a man in the house, you could lose your public housing. So you begin to see this massive decline in marriage. One of the most important things for getting out of poverty is a stable, intact family. The data is clear. Fatherhood participation. The data is clear. And so we had policies that weren’t thinking about embedded complexity of how actual communities flourish, broke apart the very things that help enable people to get out of poverty. Now, I don’t think they were that intended. I don’t think people like Sargent Shriver, right, who was John Kennedy’s brother-in-law, very important person in the Great Society. I don’t think Lyndon Baines Johnson. I don’t think they were like, let’s go. I mean, if you listen to Lyndon Baines Johnson’s speeches, you can hear kind of aspects of social flourishing. We have to rebuild these opportunities, communities. But it was this hubris of the designer. All right, this technocratic vision that didn’t pay attention and actually ends up really creating huge problems

Peter Lipsett: Mm-hmm.

Michael Matheson Miller: in the United States. And then this creates, which we get into a little bit, but it creates all these incentives. So a poverty industry emerges. In the United States, you have teachers unions connected to public schools. Public schools fail. And you have these battles between teachers unions and schools, et cetera. And who gets left out? Poor children. Right. And you have welfare. And the incentives, like we talked about with the benefits cliffs, create incentives for you not to do the very things that will help you get out of poverty. And then you create intergenerational poverty. So what we were trying to do in this film is to show, I haven’t thought about it from that way before. And it’s not that, as I said, Sargent Shriver was a bad guy. It was that he wasn’t paying attention to complexity. He had a technocratic vision, and Johnson, and you know, the Nixon administration. I mean, it’s going on and on, right? It’s not like a Republican or Democrat thing. OK, they had a technocratic vision. And so the natural communities where people flourish broke apart and this creates poverty. And sorry about that. That’s a, that was a beautiful thing. The hearts just came up. That was, that was great. Anyway, anyway, too funny. So anyway, but anyway, so the natural communities broke apart.

Peter Lipsett: Yeah.

Michael Matheson Miller: And it’s very hard to become wealthy if you have all these headwinds against you. I mean, you and I work right now. There’s high inflation. There’s all these challenges coming at us. Imagine if you have, in addition to just the natural headwinds that anybody has to go through to make a living. And now you have these five problems that poor people have to address. It’s very hard to make it out.

Peter Lipsett: So there’s lots of ways then that you can make it out. But there seems to be a slight indictment of the nonprofit community in your movie. So in some of the materials that your team shared, I saw the trailer. It’s great, looks fabulous. But there’s this quote from this one woman who’s part of this community outside of Dallas that seems to be thriving. I’m sure the movie will tell me more. But she says, quote, no thriving community is being run or governed by a nonprofit, end quote. That seems to be a pretty tough indictment on the general nonprofit ethos in poverty alleviation. To what extent are nonprofits specifically or generally actually getting in the way of fixing poverty? What did you hear in your interviews?

Michael Matheson Miller: Yeah, that’s a very good question. I mean, I think, so that’s Gabe Madison, who was the former president of Bonton Farms. And we tell the story of Bonton and the work that they’ve done. Daron Babcock, who started it, you know, he makes this very point like it can’t be artificial. And so one of the problems with nonprofits is that it’s very important. She says in the film they had started a farmers market. And I’m not going to go into all the details, but it’s a very poor community. It’s a food desert. It’s in South Dallas. It’s actually in South Dallas proper. It’s not very far from downtown. And they have like the statistics are just incredible. You know, graduation rates are low, poverty high, single mothers, crime, et cetera. The life expectancy for men in that part of Dallas was 11 years shorter than other people in the county. I mean, it’s crazy the amount of diabetes and kidney failure and all these other things going on. So they did this work and they kind of built, they started to build businesses in this place. So they started a farmers market was a big thing and a little garden, a little farm. And they went on. And she says, people always ask me, like, why don’t you give your food away for free? And she says, in what thriving community do you know of where you can just walk into a store and get food for free? Right now, there’s the, in a sense, the summary answer to your question. The nonprofit, I think in order to be positive has to be a catalyst, an onramp into actually building independence and building commercial society. What’s missing in the developing world and what’s missing in a lot of poor communities in America is actually commercial society. And so the commerce is drugs and prostitution and all this kind of stuff. It’s not the commerce that actually allows you to get out of poverty. And so I think the problem, the way a nonprofit can do things really well is come in, go alongside, exercise what was called the principle of subsidiarity. That is get those closest to the problem to be the protagonist of the solution. So don’t run an after school program where you bring children in, but you don’t bring the families in. Then you’re not actually creating the independence. Most middle-class and wealthy families don’t rely on nonprofits at all. Maybe their church or they participate, but they don’t rely on nonprofits for their services. Okay. A little bit, right? But they don’t, there’s not a big reliance there, but a lot of poor people are actually reliant upon all these things and all these nonprofit services need, require fundraising and fundraising means they always have to be artificially supported. But if you actually have a business, a supermarket, that sells to people, then it actually starts to become a natural way the commercial society grows up and they create jobs and independence and growth in the economy. And so one of the things we talk about very briefly is one of the things we’ve tried to do to solve the problem of food deserts, and if you need me to explain what those are, I’m happy to, is through food banks. But food banks require artificial support forever and ever until the end of ages, right? Whereas if you actually have an ecosystem of food production, commerce, supermarkets, sales, and they don’t have to be big supermarkets, but it’s actually a natural way that people get their food instead of getting it for free. Then you create a commercial society and then this commercial society allows people to get out of poverty. So I think that’s the fundamental critique of nonprofits is not that they don’t care, not that they’re bad, but it’s that they tend to rely on non natural ways of getting out of poverty. And so like, you know, we’re critical of a lot of the big NGOs throughout the world. And I don’t just mean to only pick on this person, but I think the example of Bill Gates is just perfect, right? Bill Gates created this incredible amount of economic value that created wealth, prosperity and social cohesion and stability for thousands and millions probably of people through Microsoft, through building these good software techniques, softwares that are usable. You can build a business. You can get a job when you have a job, you’re making money. You can have money, you can get a house, you can get into your community. You can do all these things. When he’s out of the business world and when he becomes a philanthropist, it’s like all that stuff that creates actual ways that people flourish doesn’t matter anymore because somehow poor people, they just can’t do it. We need to just consistently provide for them. And I think this is the real indictment, if you will, if I want to use that word, of nonprofits is not that their heart’s in the right place, but they’re not thinking about the problem in the normal way. How would they want to be able to live? Do you want people to give you gifts? Do you want people to come give your children gifts for Christmas? Or do you want to have a job so you can buy your children gifts for Christmas? Right. And, you know, there’s just a lack of commerce, a lack of educational opportunity. So the natural way that people, middle class and upper class, oftentimes those things are blocked. And so can you make it out? 100%. It’s possible. But things that we take for granted don’t exist in poor communities.

Peter Lipsett: So then what should donors listening who, you know, so often we think of charity, we think of food banks, we think of homeless shelters, we think of this human suffering alleviation things when we even use the word charity. If people really want to help, what from the film, from your learnings here, where can donors actually in a most leveraged way put their dollars?

Michael Matheson Miller: Well, let’s begin with an idea and then we’ll go from the idea to action. What is charity? Charity comes from the Latin word Caritas, right? Which means love. And the definition, traditional definition of love is to seek the good of the other. That is to will the other person’s benevolence and their success and their flourishing. And so the first question is, are the charitable activities that we’re engaged in actually willing the best for the other? Are they treating, like, would we treat our children? Our grandchildren. Our best friends. The way we treat somebody that we’re giving money to. Do we have enough belief in that person that we know if we can come alongside you, we can help you flourish or are we like, well, they just can’t do it. We’re going to give it. And I want to talk about dependency in this context. OK, so the first is the right idea of charity is to help people flourish. And so look into the work we’re doing. I mean, it’s hard. I’m not saying I’m great at this, Peter. It’s difficult. Like, how should we help people? Okay, are the charities I’m supporting actually helping people to work? So let me give you an example. We feature a group called Watered Gardens. They’re out of Joplin, Missouri. It’s a homeless shelter.

Peter Lipsett: Episode 61 of Giving Ventures, you can hear from James.

Michael Matheson Miller: There you go. Sixty one. James Whitford is a friend and he’s very impressive. And they realized that as they were giving charity away, they were just keeping people homeless. And they began to say, no, if you want to participate in our project. Now, if you’re starving, you just give them, if you’re dying, you don’t say, well, would you like a job? Let’s practice subsidiarity. I mean, you don’t do that, right? So you obviously use our intellect here. But if you’re…

Peter Lipsett: Right.

Michael Matheson Miller: And you’re going through this thing. What did Watered Gardens do? They realized we’re not helping you. Somebody told James you’re making it too easy for us to be homeless. So they said, OK, what are we going to do? We’re going to get a work requirement. So they go to work in this thing called their Thrift Shop. They work. They don’t give nothing away for free. And Bonton as well. There are these homeless shelters, homeless pallets, right? If you want to be there, OK, you got to water the garden. You got to feed the animals. Now think about it. If they don’t show up one day to feed the animals. If you didn’t water the garden, the plants and animals are going to die if you don’t do your job.

Peter Lipsett: Dignity. It’s giving people dignity.

Michael Matheson Miller: And people say, wait a minute, you mean I matter? I don’t matter for anything. No, you matter. You’re important. We need you to do this so we can get this thing forward. You mean I get to go to the workshop, work and then choose the food I want instead of somebody just giving me the handout? Yeah. And then it created, exactly, it awakens like it awakens in them. Like, wait, I matter. I’m somebody. And this goes to dependency. Probably one of the most interesting things for me, we think about dependency as kind of like an abstract concept of there are poor people stuck on welfare. Okay, but if we think about dependency the way poor people think about dependency. What is dependency? Dependency is the situation where I believe I have absolutely nothing of value to add or give anybody else. And when we give somebody like that something for free, we’re telling them you’re right. You’re useless and we don’t have any faith in you. That’s dependency. And so are our actions actually creating dependency or are they saying, I believe you can be something else. It’s Mel Hernandez who’s in our film says, you know, oftentimes it’s not convincing the poor, it’s convincing people who are helping the poor that the poor have value. And in fact, at the Center for Social Flourishing, I’m happy to share this with your listeners.

Peter Lipsett: Mm-hmm.

Michael Matheson Miller: We have this survey and this tool we’re working on, we’re still working on it, but we’re using it, where it gives you some questions and then a survey of like, am I doing this well? Is this happening well? Am I practicing the principle of subsidiarity? We explain what that means. Am I doing things for others that they should be doing for themselves? All right. And so I’m happy if your listeners want that, we can figure out a way and get it to you. You could use that. That’s an analysis. It’s meant for organizations to analyze their work. Right. And True Charity has some other relevant things. There’s another group we work with called Poverty Stoplight who has some really interesting things about putting the person at the center and the family at the center, which is very important because people are not radical individuals. They live in families. So I would say like those are the first things, the ideas and then the application. Am I actually creating this dependency? And then the other thing is this. I mean, some of the people who listen to DonorsTrust are very successful business people. They’ve done incredible things and they want to make sure their money is used well. So what I say is they have so many skills. What about taking those skills and actually going and helping poor people? And part of the attitude might be, well, come on. I mean, I don’t just want to waste my time serving at a soup kitchen. I could make enough money in a couple of days to fund the soup kitchen. That might be one attitude. Father Sirico, the co-founder of the Acton Institute, has a great story. He was talking to a friend of his. He tells the story and he said, you should go volunteer at the soup kitchen. He’s a very wealthy, successful man. And the man said something like, I mean, I could make enough money in a half a day to fund the soup kitchen for a year. And Father Sirico says, I’m sorry. You thought I was talking about helping them. I’m talking about you. You need to go to the soup kitchen. So, I mean, that’s one thing, just engaging with people and, and I mean, I’m, I need to give that lecture to myself for the record, Peter. OK, I’m not, I’m preaching to myself. You know, I’m not saying that I’m a model, but I think us actually engaging with people, talking to poor people. If you see a homeless person, you can’t save their life. There’s not enough for you to do there, but you could have a, you could ask them their name. And one of the men I interviewed, Jack Briggs who was a retired general in the Air Force and then ran a homeless shelter in Colorado Springs called Springs Rescue Mission. Excellent place. He says, you know, something very powerful is like people say, what should I do when I see a homeless person? And he says, it doesn’t matter what you do, because there’s nothing you can do in one moment that’s going to change their life, which is a little bit both depressing and also encouraging. You need relationship. But he says, but what you can do is ask them their name and be in a relationship, not their street name, their real name, because so many people who are homeless haven’t heard their name in years. So talk to a homeless person, see what they’re saying, learn something. But the other thing, think about all the skills from finance, entrepreneurship, to problem-solving, to idea generation, to like, what if we did it this way? And actually spent time listening to people and then figure out how to help. And I mean, one of the big main characters in our film is a guy called Daron Babcock. So he wasn’t the social engineer from way outside who just planned the community to live in. He actually went and moved into the community. Now I’m not saying everybody has to do that. But he used his skill as an investor, as an entrepreneur to help people actually build businesses. And I think one of the things that we don’t do enough of across the board. I’ve thought of this for four years. I thought I should start this. I’m Catholic. So start with the Catholic organization. All the people who give money or who don’t want to give money because I don’t know if it’s going to be used well. What if you could get all these people with all these skills and they became partners with people both in the United States and outside to actually use their skills to help people build businesses, to develop skill education, to help them train how to be a better father, a better mother. You know, there’s just untold social wealth. That’s not being used in the nonprofit world that could have transformative effects. There’s no single solution or panacea to the problem of poverty. Okay, but there’s so much I think that’s left on the table that people of goodwill could do, but that needs a reframing of the problem. And we can’t just think of it as, you know, I give charity to the nonprofit.

Peter Lipsett: Right. Well, fortunately, somebody has made a movie that is going to not solve our problem, but is going to reframe it for us. And I can’t wait for the new film to come out. Talk just really quickly as we wrap up. What’s the release schedule? How can folks see a screening, support the film, otherwise get involved with what’s going on here?

Michael Matheson Miller: I hope so. Great. Yeah. Thanks, Peter. So the general outline is right now we’re in the beginning of pre-screenings. We’ve just done one in the Leadership Program of the Rockies in Denver or Colorado Springs last week. We’ll be having a private screening in Houston coming out and Phoenix in the month of March this month. We’ll probably have a couple more private pre-screenings. And this is an opportunity for us, the filmmakers, to see audiences see it, to see how they react to it. We’re submitting to film festivals now over the next several months. And the real release structure of a documentary that we did with Poverty Inc. that was very helpful was you go to film festivals. The film festivals are a gateway for people to watch it. And that helps with digital distribution. So we’ll be in kind of private pre-screening and film festival and private screening mode, you know, as we do our premieres over the next several months. And then in ’27, 2027, there will actually be the digital release of the film. The film won’t be released digitally until we’ve done a whole film festival screening, college screenings, other private screenings, they’ll become public later. But right now there’s no public screenings. But if you want, you can go to PovertyTrapFilm.org, Poverty Trap Film. And you can also go to the Center for Social Flourishing, which is SocialFlourishing.com to learn a little bit about it and to Acton Institute. But yeah, Poverty Trap Film, you can see the trailer and you can sign up there if you’re interested in hosting a screening in the future, if you’re interested in learning more and our team can be in contact with you. And yeah, to support the film, go to Poverty Trap and to the Acton Institute. So thanks Peter for the chance to have me on your show.

Peter Lipsett: Thank you. I could talk to you for another hour or two about this. I’m no Joe Rogan. So I’ll leave that for longer winded podcasters. So thank you for putting this out into the world and for prompting this discussion just like you did with Poverty Inc. I think it’s so important and I can’t wait to see the film.

Michael Matheson Miller: Joe has good hair. Joe Rogan has good hair. Well, thank you for your kind words and for your support. Yeah, thank you very much, Peter.

Peter Lipsett: Social engineering does not solve poverty. Hasn’t yet. Isn’t going to. Sometimes what’s needed is tough talk. Sometimes what’s needed is business and enterprise. As Michael said, the right idea of charity is to help people flourish, to empower them to find their own way up and forward, rather than just to make them comfortable and dependent at the bottom of the ladder. I’m really excited to see this film. I’m excited to see the ripples that it creates in the poverty community and the donor community about how we tackle these really thorny, really challenging issues. I think it’s going to be really, really exciting to see, very interesting, and certainly will provoke a lot of conversations. Well, thank you for listening. Thank you, those of you who are part of DonorsTrust. We’re thrilled to have you. And, you know, there’s this misconception out there that all DonorsTrust donors give to is public policy work. And yes, there’s a lot of public policy giving that comes out of DonorsTrust, but our donors also support churches and synagogues. They support civic organizations and the arts and yes, human service, poverty alleviation, homelessness alleviation programs across the country. And we would love to be helpful to you in that to help really have an impact with your charitable giving. Go to DonorsTrust.org and you can learn more. You can reach out to us TellMeMore@DonorsTrust.org. We would be delighted to have a conversation and explore how we could be helpful to you and the charitable impact that you want to have. And of course, if you would take a minute to rate this podcast, hopefully five stars on whatever podcatcher or on YouTube where you’re listening, because that helps more people find it. And I would love for more people to find this and hear how they can really have an impact with their philanthropy. That is what we are here to do. That’s what DonorsTrust is about. And so you can do your small little piece by helping promote it in that way or share it with a friend. We’d love that as well. Well, that’s it for today. We’ll be back very soon with another great episode, another great conversation. Until then, thank you for being a giver. We’ll talk more soon.