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When you go into a doctor's office, a credible, intelligent physician will first of all attempt to do that which is least intrusive to your body.
But what we do traditionally in our neighborhoods is we apply the moral equivalent of a transplant. What government does when there is a problem - if there is a pregnancy problem, let's parachute in a program. If someone is unemployed there's a program - instead of saying let's look at the remedy that's closest to the problem.
At the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise we go in to low-income, crime-infested neighborhoods and we ask questions that professional service industry and scholars never ask of poor people. We ask them not how many children are dropping out of school or in jail or on drugs; we want to know how many people are raising children that have not succumb to the lure of drug addiction, have not become predators.
And once we find them we apply miracle grow in the form of training and technical assistance and then introduce them to sources of financial support. And so we are able to grow remedies that are indigenous to these low-income, high crime neighborhoods by reaching out to grassroots leaders that are in poverty but not of poverty. They are in drug addiction neighborhoods but they are not of those neighborhoods.
In one city in New Jersey, pizza companies couldn't deliver in low-in, high crime, black neighborhoods because of the crime. Well, a neighborhood group got together and got some 18 and 20 year old kids who set up a pizza delivery business. They say "It's warm, it's good, it's from the hood." And they partnered with one of the pizza companies who taught them how to sell pizzas, and they delivered those pizzas inside as their business. And it prospered. Because no one would stick 'em up because they were from the community.
The reason that AIDS is so devastating is because it destroys the body's ability to heal itself. Well, we look at our grassroots leaders as the last antibodies. They are indigenous to the body. They are closest to the source of disease. So therefore if you strengthen the body's immune system the body will heal itself.
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For more from Robert Woodson, visit the Voices page on PovertyCure [ Ссылка ]
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PovertyCure is an international coalition of organizations and individuals committed to entrepreneurial solutions to poverty that challenge the status quo and champion the creative potential of the human person.
