A Path Appears: Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity

“The truth is that in recent years it has become clear that modest sums can help overcome disease and ease malnutrition and that innovations allow organizations to become more effective in saving lives and attacking the cycle of poverty.”

This quotation highlights one of the main themes of the book, which is that people don’t have to be millionaires or donate large sums of money to make a difference. The authors repeatedly try to debunk that myth, informing readers that any amount of money they give can have an effect in improving someone’s life. Among the examples they give is the cost of medicine to deworm a child in Africa or Asia: just 50 cents a year.

“Charities across the United States employ 13 million people and take in $1.5 trillion in revenues each year, not just from donations but also from government grants for running programs for the homeless or low-income schoolchildren. That means that the charity industry accounts for 10 percent of the economy—twice the share of national defense. Yet there is negligible scrutiny or accountability, and among the 1.4 million charities in the United States, including churches, there are some that do little more than benefit their founders.”

This gives a picture of the size of charities in the United States and juxtaposes that with the lack of oversight they receive. Here the authors are acknowledging what prevents many people from donating money to charities: uncertainty about where their money actually goes. They try to overcome this, however, as one of the purposes of the book is to encourage people to do their homework and follow the evidence that is increasingly available regarding charities’ effectiveness.

“Why does the United States spend more than $20 billion a year on farm programs but less than $4 billion a year on education and early care for children in the critical first two years of life? Are corn and soybeans really a higher priority for America’s future than our children? The explanation, of course, is that there’s a vigorous agribusiness lobby, and much less of a lobby for vulnerable children. So America needs volunteers not just to deliver bowls of soup to the homeless but also to demand—through organizations such as ONE—that the president, members of Congress, cabinet members, governors, legislators, and mayors make kids a higher priority.”

Early in the book, the authors present three ways people can help improve the lives of others: donate money, volunteer their time doing direct work, and advocating for a cause. The last is something people often overlook, not realizing how important it is. However, the authors make the case that advocacy is extremely important, which the above quotation helps to make clear.

“Rigorous evaluation is essential, whether we’re talking about poverty in India or in America. The stakes are too great to fight the global war on poverty based on hunches and intuition. Just as the investment world has become increasingly rigorous, the nonprofit world should as well. If it’s important for businesses to be meticulous in planning a new business line, it’s even more critical for an aid organization or donor to rely on careful evidence to plan the best way to fight malaria or educate children.”

This quotation is taken from the chapter about the importance of evaluation for aid programs. One of the themes of the book involves the role of evidence-based research in directing aid where it can be most effective. The authors argue for rigorous studies to evaluate programs not only to prevent the waste of resources but to ensure that the people who need help actually receive it.

“Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is an extreme but useful place to glimpse the challenges of poverty in America. It’s pretty obvious here that past efforts haven’t worked brilliantly and that something new is needed. One reason decades of efforts have not achieved as much against poverty as we would like may be that, in general, our well-meant interventions come too late. If there’s one overarching lesson from the past few decades of research about how to break the cycles of poverty in the United States, it’s the importance of intervening early, ideally in the first year or two of life or even before the child is born. That’s often where our assistance will be most effective and efficient.”

This underscores the need for early intervention in social problems, one of the themes of the book. Health problems, substance abuse, unemployment, and violence are all endemic at Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and are virtually intractable. The consequences of fetal alcohol syndrome, for example, have proven difficult to overcome, and many efforts to improve the quality of life for residents of the reservation have had little success. The authors argue it’s time to focus more on prevention programs to try to chip away at the problems.

“The Rand Corporation crunched the numbers and found a huge payoff: with low-income unmarried mothers, each $1 invested in nurse visits produced $5.70 in benefits. [. . .] The Nurse-Family Partnership has now grown to have a presence in more than forty states and is spreading to other countries, including Britain, Netherlands, Canada, and Australia. Yet, because of limited financing, it still serves only 2 to 3 percent of the need in the United States. That’s a stark example of mistaken priorities. Here we have one of the most rigorously backed antipoverty programs in America, one that pays for itself several times over in reduced costs later on, and yet it has funds to serve only 2 to 3 percent of eligible families. That’s infuriating.”

This quotation also emphasizes the need for early intervention in addressing problems. Research has shown how cost effective the Nurse-Family Partnership is, but it remains underfunded. The authors strongly argue for an expansion of the program to meet the need in various communities. By not doing so, they assert, the problems will only be harder to solve and far more expensive.

“Let’s acknowledge that this area of early childhood education is controversial, and that some Americans see it as intrusive big government getting its foot in the family door. It’s also true that many programs succeed as experiments and then don’t work as well when scaled up. Some enthusiasts see early childhood interventions as a silver bullet to fight poverty—but there are no silver bullets in this area. Everything is more complex and difficult than it seems. Yet a broad range of evidence from the United States and other countries, backed by the latest findings about brain development, support the argument that the earliest interventions are the most cost effective. James Heckman, the University of Chicago economist, writes: ‘We can invest early to close disparities and prevent achievement gaps, or we can pay to remediate disparities when they are harder and more expensive to close. Either way, we are going to pay.’”

Summarizing their views on early intervention programs, the authors in this quotation tamp down expectations that such programs can solve everything. They can’t—only because nothing can. The evidence remains, however, that they are the most cost-effective option. In short, early intervention programs are the best tools we have and we should make the most of them.

“The common thread among these three groups is a cultural emphasis on diligence or education, linked to an immigrant drive. Jews and Chinese have a particularly strong tradition of respect for scholarship, with Jews said to have achieved complete adult male literacy—the better to read the Torah—some 1,700 years before any other group. In China, the parallel force was Confucianism and its reverence for education. Among West Indians, the crucial factors for success seem to be the classic diligence and hard work associated with immigrants, and intact families. The upshot has been higher family incomes and fathers more involved in child rearing.”

This quotation reflects some of the research done on what is informally called “grit.” It refers to the qualities of self-control, delayed gratification, and diligence that allows one to persevere in the face of challenges and work toward long-term goals. The three groups mentioned in the quotation have been noted as fostering the necessary nurturing involved in instilling grit in children. By studying these groups, researchers hope to pinpoint how grit can be taught.

“The world desperately needs to help kids avoid unintended pregnancies—for their sake and for the sake of their children. That means more comprehensive sex education programs in schools, and more publicly funded clinics to provide contraception. One study by the Guttmacher Institute found that without publicly funded contraception, the rate of unintended pregnancies among teenagers in the United States would be 73 percent higher. Public investment in pregnancy prevention is enormously cost effective, for unintended pregnancies cost taxpayers $12.5 billion a year—and that includes only the first year of health care for the infant. Each dollar invested in contraception programs pays for itself many times over, yet federal funding for family planning through Title X (the main United States source of such funds) is, after inflation, less than one-third what it was in 1980.”

This is another example the authors give of the importance of early intervention. The emphasis throughout the book is particularly on programs that solve or mitigate social problems before they take root, and here the authors address the issue of unplanned pregnancies. By presenting the annual cost to taxpayers in the US—in the billions—for such pregnancies, they hope to persuade readers to support early intervention programs.

“The blunt truth is that this cynical view has a certain foundation: self- destructive behaviors are indeed a factor in poverty at home and abroad. We must acknowledge all the underlying pathologies, including the human capacity to make bad choices. But these issues are far more complex than cynics believe, and the solution is not just to scold the poor. Humans anywhere in the world can be locked in a ‘poverty trap’ of despair and sometimes clinical depression. One way of making a difference is to provide a ray of hope. We think this is an important new area of research, and scholarly understanding of it is still unfolding, but it helps explain a great deal of what we’ve seen both in the United States and abroad—and ultimately it’s encouraging in that it offers tools to make a difference, spreading opportunity to adults as well as children.”

The authors carefully walk a tightrope in the book between being optimistic and acknowledging barriers or challenges. They strive to be realistic while still presenting hope for a better future. In this quotation, they are addressing the notion that the poor don’t always make the best choices. This can prevent people from trying to help, as they see their efforts as a waste of time or money. The authors counter that all of us make poor choices at times, and research shows that when people lose hope they tend to make more of them. Thus, it’s important to keep hope alive by participating in a solution to the problem rather than ignoring it, and people not trapped in the depressive cycle of the “poverty trap” are best equipped to intervene.

“Cure Violence offers a window into the power of public health programs, which work with large clusters of people as opposed to clinical efforts involving a doctor and a patient. The public health campaign against cigarette smoking, which used cigarette taxes, public education, and warnings to reduce the share of adults who smoke from 42 percent in 1965 to 18 percent today, has saved hundreds of thousands of lives annually. Likewise, the public health campaign against drunk driving and traffic deaths has been one of the great successes of American policy to save lives.”

Many of the programs the authors write about deal with aid to individuals. Conversely, Cure Violence, which is described at length in Chapter 9, focuses on communities at large. The authors remind readers of the effectiveness of widespread public health campaigns, like those against drunk driving and smoking, and argue that they need to remain one of the tools in fighting social problems.

“Yet overall Becca’s success rate is remarkable: 72 percent of the women who enter Magdalene graduate two years later, clean and sober and ready for a new life. More than 150 women are now graduates of the program. Magdalene has steadily expanded and now has six houses in Nashville with twenty-eight beds. That’s a fraction of what’s needed, and there’s a long waiting list. ‘I could fill 1,000 beds,’ Becca says. She notes that it’s far cheaper to keep the women in Magdalene, even with lavish services, than to keep them in prison—and Magdalene’s outcomes are far better.”

This quotation refers to the Magdalene program founded by Reverend Becca Stevens. It serves women in the Nashville area who are survivors of sex trafficking. It’s another example of the effectiveness of early intervention—in this case, treating women before they end up in the costly prison system—but also illustrates how helping others can assist people with their own healing. Rev. Stevens is herself a survivor of sexual abuse, and reaching out to help others in a similar situation not only heals the women in the program but also aids in Stevens’s own healing.

“Charities save lives, promote literacy, and reduce hunger, but for all the good they do, they could accomplish far more if they were better organized. Nonprofits still have one foot in the eighteenth-century preindustrial economy, for they are atomized into tiny and inefficient players, held back, as we’ll see, by public resistance to businesslike steps that would allow them to scale up and modernize. It’s time to rethink what a charity should be.”

The authors devote one of the book’s three sections to the idea expressed in this quotation. This stems from their goal of making the business of giving as effective and efficient as can be. If charities are not well run, resources are being wasted and people are not getting the help they need. Many people, both in the development community and among donors, are opposed to applying methods found in for-profit organization to charities; the authors think this is wrong if it would improve results.

“One approach was to offer a rational appeal emphasizing the scale of the global hunger crisis with a placard noting that ‘more than 11 million people in Ethiopia need immediate food assistance’ and that ‘food shortages in Malawi are affecting more than 3 million children.’ That failed. People did not connect to impersonal statistics. Another strategy was an emotional call to help one particular girl [. . .] Rokia’s photo accompanied the text, and people rushed to donate. We’re invariably more moved by individual stories than by data. This research underscores that decisions about helping others are largely emotional and intuitive, not guided by rational assessments of where the needs are greatest. Indeed, rational analysis seems to decrease generosity.”

This quotation presents the results of research into what prompts people to give money for a cause. It shows that giving is driven more by emotions than by rational thinking. Whatever one thinks of this, if stories like Rokia’s are what gets help for people, the authors argue, that is the approach organizations should take in their fundraising.

“From the ashes of that bakery, Novogratz began to experiment with ‘impact investing’—applying charitable donations to support for-profit businesses. Novogratz’s own Acumen Fund does impact investing around the world, providing funding for small companies that do everything from manufacture antimalarial bed nets to provide medical care in India. Instead of folding business savvy, marketing expertise, or businesslike practices into nonprofit organizations, the way Dan Pallotta does, these enterprises start from the other end of the spectrum by folding a social mission into a for-profit business. ‘Change the way the world tackles poverty,’ Acumen urges donors.”

This quotation presents an example of the ways charities might diverge from the old model and create a new one in which profit plays a role. The bakery referred to in the first sentence was a company in Rwanda run by women that Jacqueline Novogratz helped to support. Novogratz became disillusioned that aid too often led to dependency rather than self-reliance. The bakery in Rwanda was independently successful in the market until the civil war in the mid-1990s forced it to close. Novogratz now backs similar ventures that provide a way for the poor to become more self-sufficient.

“Encourage a major Western company to source its coffee beans from impoverished farmers with sustainable practices and those farmers will benefit more than from a thousand small aid projects. And if the company adopts a policy, where possible, of paying the mother of the house for the coffee beans rather than the father, in one stroke school attendance will rise because more of the money will go for school fees and less for banana beer. Likewise, when companies give employees time and space to take on pro bono projects, this can be an important source of expertise and talent for nonprofits. The tendency in the humanitarian world has been to see corporations as part of the problem, but they can also be part of the solution, and we hope more corporate employees will encourage their companies to improve their social responsibility efforts so that they can have far-reaching impact.”

This addresses how to include corporations in development as part of rethinking what charities can be. People in development often object to this on the grounds that corporations are first and foremost seeking to earn a profit; people in business say the same thing—and that development goals hinder this purpose. The authors feel there is a middle ground and argue that the scale of large corporations means a small action can have far-reaching effects.

“The nonprofit world is in desperate need of the corporate skill set, and our guess is that companies would be rewarded with increased morale and greater success in recruitment and retention. In the same vein, it would be good to see more corporations take on social joint ventures from time to time, in echoes of what Danone did with Grameen to make yogurt. If we insist on nonprofits and corporations being kept in separate silos, we all lose.”

Here the authors declare their support of charities that make use of corporate methods in certain areas. In this context, they are referring to volunteer programs like IBM’s Corporate Service Corps, which allows employees to donate their time and advice. Their education and experience can make a difference and do much good, the authors assert.

“Charity: water’s success reflects the success of what might be called giving communities or giving circles, to mark philanthropy as a communal and social activity. Charity:water excels at uniting people and giving them all a sense that they are accomplishing something important and altruistic, maybe even lifesaving, for a modest sum of money. It’s an immensely social activity, and that’s perhaps as it should be.”

The runaway success of Scott Harrison’s charity:water drew on social media for reaching a large number of people in a short period. The charity also devised a mode of giving that makes it a fun event for a group of friends or family members to engage in together. This illustrates the authors’ notion that giving should be a positive, affirming phenomenon and not a sacrifice. It also reflects research showing that people are more generous when they are observed by others.

“A year after Rachel’s death, Samantha Paul traveled to Ethiopia to see the wells that her daughter had financed. In one village receiving a well, the church held a memorial service for Rachel, her photo on the altar, and the priests spent the entire night before the service praying for the girl and her mom. Another village created Rachel’s Park to honor the girl who had brought its people their first clean water ever. Tekloini Assefa, who heads an Ethiopian well-drilling organization, declared to a group including Rachel’s mom: ‘Samantha, your little girl is an inspiration to us all. We have heavy hearts imagining what it was like to lose Rachel due to such horrific circumstances. It is something no parent ever wants to contemplate, let alone live through. Even more remarkable is that Rachel developed such a big heart from such a young age—that she understood and felt the pain of others on the other side of the world. To give up her birthday presents so that other children can improve their lives is the most beautiful gift a person can give.’”

Rachel Beckwith was the girl who worked to raise money for charity:water through her ninth birthday party. When she was killed shortly afterward, donations skyrocketed in her memory until they reached over $1 million. This proves the authors’ point that one person can make a difference—in this case a big difference. The quotation also shows how helping others can help someone deal with tragedy, as Rachel’s mother found a certain level of peace in the gratitude of those who were helped by Rachel’s donation.

“Oxytocin works alongside two other neurotransmitters, dopamine and serotonin, to make us feel good when we do good. Serotonin interacts with oxytocin and dopamine to drive the happy feeling we get as a result of an altruistic act. Dopamine helps trigger the rewarding feeling you get when you eat chocolate, and it helps to produce the rush we get when we give—what Mayr and Harbaugh measured in the nucleus accumbens using brain scans. Oxytocin, which runs near the bottom of the brain and is thus harder to image clearly, helps give us a tingle like a warm bath. ‘With the oxytocin system, we’re hardwired to get bodily rewards from being prosocial and altruistic,’ says Saturn. ‘We kind of get those benefits very peripherally by calming down our heart and feeling warm and fuzzy.’”

The three people named in this quotation are researchers who have studied the effects of giving on the brain. The authors wanted to find the roots of altruism—where it comes from in humans—and this may help to explain it. The fact that chemicals in the brain promoting happiness are released when people give suggests that humans may to a certain extent be “hardwired” to help others. 

“Smith’s trajectory reflects a truth that social scientists are still exploring: that the act of supporting others somehow seems to be a step toward overcoming one’s own injuries. When we are hurt physically or psychically, we often feel we want to curl up and hide. Yet that’s a time when it can be particularly important to reach out and, paradoxically, try to help others. It’s also worth wondering: since so many people would benefit from a little more engagement with others, why wait for a crisis or tragedy to serve as the catalyst?”

Timothy Smith was an Iraq War veteran struggling to leave behind the nightmare of war and go on with life in the US. After working in a program as a counselor to other veterans, he found a purpose and went on to found a business designed to give veterans a job while they worked toward a degree. The authors use his story as one example of how helping others can contribute to one’s own healing.

“‘It’s a nightmare,’ says Cheryl Dorsey, the head of Echoing Green, a nonprofit we mentioned earlier that supports social entrepreneurs. ‘I start every talk I give at a university saying, ‘Please don’t start another social enterprise!’ Young people have equated success with being a founder. That’s the Achilles’ heel of our movement. We’re heading in the wrong direction if we let a million flowers bloom. It’s not enough to have these tiny centers for excellence that never amount to anything. They’re too fragmented, too balkanized to ever move the needle.’ Dorsey tells young people that the biggest need now is for the ‘intrapreneur,’ the person who can move into an existing enterprise or institution, shake it up, and boost its productivity.”

This refers to the recent trend of eager college graduates (and even those who are still students) founding their own organizations. The vast majority disappear within a few years, and the authors argue that it would be better if more people joined existing organizations with a proven track record and expertise resulting from experience. In a way, this also ties in with their argument that business methods be adopted by charities: both would make charities more effective, which would ultimately benefit those in need.

“And that’s one of the basic points that we’ve been trying to make throughout this book: there are ways to incorporate giving into our daily lives so that they constitute not a sacrifice but an opportunity and a heady pleasure.”

This quotation succinctly expresses the authors’ feeling that giving should be a joyful, positive thing. Earlier in the book, they review the brain science involved in altruism, which shows that pleasure centers light up in a brain scan when the subject thinks about giving, so there’s some research behind this idea of taking joy from giving. It’s all part of the theme that givers as well as recipients benefit from altruism.