The Culture of Poverty Eats Policy for Breakfast 

Culture eats strategy for breakfast.1 It’s an illustrative phrase to warn executives that you cannot change the strategy of a community, an organization, or a system without focusing on culture and the beliefs people hold about how things work. 

The idea of a Poverty Alleviation System powerfully contradicts executives who are immersed in the management of requirements for a fragmented and random array of community programs. They feel genuine excitement about focusing on how to rearrange work into clearer pathways that lead people out of poverty and reduce poverty rates. 

 As more coherence emerges in the human services sector, we can find opportunities to enlist other sectors in ending poverty. For example, in workforce development, employers can challenge their mind-sets about employees with backgrounds in poverty and can implement responsive ways to do business to be more successful. Teachers can integrate pedagogies for engaging children from homes in poverty. Civic groups can question their hidden biases and rules that make it difficult for those in poverty to feel welcomed. Philanthropic organizations can analyze whether their funding practices favor short-term wins at the exclusion of long-term gains. Whatever the challenges, transformational leaders engage in crucial conversations that generate a cohesive shared vision of ending poverty. 

As leaders of a new system that is accountable to reducing poverty rates, our vision must be clear in order to avoid confusion when communicating it to others. We need to be able to articulate it in one minute, in a Ted Talk format, and in longer public speaking opportunities. It needs to be repeated with consistency by our leadership team. The vision must be compelling, urgent, and feel like something that we can accomplish. We must also identify the high-impact strategies that will allow us to achieve the vision. 

Once we have a clear and compelling vision, we can begin the process of aligning with others to achieve the vision. Who in the other sectors of our society are already moving in this direction? How can we join them? Which organizations have the most capacity? Which can we build effective partnerships with, and is this the right time to proceed? 

What has to be learned in order to achieve the vision? How will we facilitate this learning agenda? What metrics will we use to know whether we are making progress and when we should make course corrections? How will our personal learning affect our ability to lead change? 

How do we embed the transformational changes into the culture? What programs, policies, and cultural changes must occur for the change to be lasting? Who are the next generation of leaders, and how will we support them to take our place?  

The plan that you develop will emerge from a strategic analysis of the people and organizations you need to align with to achieve a more powerful shared vision. For lasting and positive change, you will also detail what you and others must learn to embed your transformation into the community. 

Remembering that culture eats strategy for breakfast, leaders must constantly share the vision with stakeholders. We usually underestimate how much communication is required to build a new world that truly lifts people out of poverty and into economic stability.  

In the next blog we follow a family through the new poverty alleviation system.