Mission & Vision

To stop social breakdown, it’s time to build.

In support of institution builders

With particular attention to problems of social and material poverty, the Center for Social Flourishing seeks to reframe thinking about the role of civil society. We activate, support, and convene leaders seeking innovative solutions to challenges in their neighborhoods and cities.

Through film, research, conferences, and a partner network, the Center spurs new thinking, collaboration, and innovation across sectors, including education, health care, technology, and financial and social services, and in the role churches play in their neighborhoods. Our center engages institution builders—local and regional leaders intent on building their communities to be places where people thrive.

Our Vision

Poverty is not simply a lack of money. 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.

The dominant humanitarian approach to poverty over the last decades has been grounded in a mechanistic worldview that sees social problems primarily as technical difficulties to be solved through social engineering, public policy, and service programs. This approach has focused too much on material deprivation often at the expense of economic independence, personal agency, and the spiritual and social dimensions of the person.

Principles

THE HUMAN PERSON, possessing dignity and creative capacity, is the subject of his or her own story of development. A person is not an object to be manipulated or engineered but a subject to be respected.
THE FAMILY is the fundamental social, cultural, and economic unit in which individuals grow and flourish. Supporting families is essential to social healing and sustained economic development.
CIVIL SOCIETY institutions are the essential mediators of community. Encroaching on their functions or independence hazards blocking social capital and removing local agency.
COMMERCIAL SOCIETY, protected by rule of law, is the normative means for escaping poverty. Catalyzing market activity should be the ultimate goal of anti-poverty programs.
THE PRINCIPLE OF SUBSIDIARITY holds that any matter is best handled by the closest competent authority. It should guide all social organization and must inform any attempts to address poverty or other social problems.

Why is any of this important?

The technocratic paradigm of large-scale social services has eroded the natural communities in which people flourish.

Top-down, centralized, and individualistic approaches to social problems have dominated over the last century. Siloed programs to solve “child poverty,” “maternal poverty,” or “elderly poverty” often ignore the key role that participation in the family household, local institutions, and commercial society play in building a complete human life. Poverty, in all its manifestations, is not a technical problem to be solved but a human problem that requires human solutions rooted in relationship and reciprocity.

What do we do?

The Center for Social Flourishing seeks to activate, support, and convene local and regional leaders seeking innovative solutions to challenges in their neighborhoods and cities. We do this through film, research, conferences, and a partner network.

Film & Media

We are producing a feature-length documentary film on social and material poverty in the United States, besides other educational media.

Research

Affiliate scholars employed by the center contribute to a growing body of knowledge about what makes individuals and communities flourish.

Conferences

Our conferences, lectures, and workshops form leaders and reframe thinking about poverty, shifting mindsets from combatting poverty to promoting the conditions for justice, flourishing, and prosperity.

Partner Network

We foster collaboration between individuals and organizations across sectors—convening, educating, activating, and supporting leaders intent on making their communities into places where people thrive.

We want to move…

From

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Paternalism

Partnerships

Providing services

Empowering families

Fostering dependency

Restoring authority

Removing agency

Building agency