about
Empowering human flourishing since XXXX.
Our Mission is…
…to reframe the discussion from combating poverty to establishing the conditions of justice and social flourishing that enable people to create prosperity in their own families and communities.
Poverty is not simply a lack of money, just as homelessness is not simply a housing problem. A good human life constitutes more than abundant material goods: Even the affluent can experience spiritual poverty and alienation.
Despite good intentions, the dominant humanitarian approach to poverty over the last decades has been one of limited horizons. It has focused too much on material deprivation, often at the expense of economic independence, and the spiritual and social dimensions of the person. This approach has been grounded in a “mechanistic” worldview that sees social problems primarily as technical difficulties to be solved through social engineering and public policy. But poverty is a human problem that requires integrated, human-centered solutions.
The Center for Social Flourishing seeks to address issues of poverty and flourishing in the United States including alienation, mental and metabolic health, incarceration, homelessness, addiction, family formation, education, civil society, and subsidiarity.
Our current predicament
60%
of an increase of the chronically homeless Americans since 2015 (from 86,000 to nearly 140,000 in 2022)
~50%
of Americans are either diabetic or pre-diabetic
1 in 25
Americans lives with a serious mental illness (like schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or major depression)
65%
is the American marriage decline rate since 1970
~37%
of single-mother families live in poverty
106,000
Americans died of a drug overdose in 2021
7+ million
of American men have dropped out of the labor force (a workforce participation rate for men not seen since the Great Depression)
Another core aspect of the center’s work will be reengaging and renewing the PovertyCure initiative, which focuses on access to the institutions of justice and entrepreneurial solutions to poverty in the developing world.
While hundreds of millions of people in the developing world have risen from material poverty in recent decades, millions still lack access to clean water, clean title to land, or participation in the formal economy. In all of the Center’s work, we strive to put the person at the center of the economy and society.
We want to move…
From → to
Aid, Handouts, Paternalism
Enterprise, Investments, Partnerships
Poverty alleviation, alienation, and exclusion
Wealth creation, community, and belonging
Viewing people and economies as experiments
Pursuing true solidarity with those living in poverty
Seeing people in poverty as recipients of charity
Agents of change with dignity, capacity, and creativity
What do we do?
The center promotes human and social flourishing through education, research, and partnerships.
Education
Our conferences, lectures, and multimedia, including online videos, podcasts, and a new feature-length documentary about poverty in the United States, will reframe the conversation about poverty, shifting mindsets from combatting poverty to promoting the conditions for justice, flourishing, and prosperity.
Research
Academic research and affiliate scholars employed by the center will contribute to a growing body of knowledge about what makes individuals and communities flourish.
Partnerships
We aim to leverage our international network of partner organizations — to learn from them, convene them, and share our own insights with their members. In time, the Center will develop a self-assessment tool for organizations interested in applying the Center’s findings in their work.
Our Principles.
- The human person must be at the center of the economy and society and the protagonist of his or her own story of development. Persons are not objects to be manipulated by social engineers but subjects to be respected.
- Poverty is complex, it has no single solution, and it is not simply a lack of material goods. Poverty always involves complicated personal, social, familial, spiritual, and economic aspects and contexts.
- For most of the world’s poor, their fundamental challenge is exclusion from the institutions of justice. In the United States and developed world, poverty is often related to a lack of access to social capital.
- The important question is not “how do we alleviate poverty?” but “how do we create the conditions so that people can create prosperity in their own families and communities?”