Stanford Social Innovation Review

On July 13, 2008, New York City’s poverty rate was 18 percent. Twenty-four hours later it had ballooned to 23 percent. How did more than 400,000 New Yorkers become impoverished overnight? The answer is that Mayor Michael Bloomberg adopted a new and more complex—and, he argued, more accurate—measure of poverty than the one the federal government uses. His action reignited a debate in Washington, D.C., and beyond about how America determines who is poor—a debate that many hope will be settled by the U.S. Congress this year.

The year 1987 is one that most residents of Littleton, Colo., would rather forget. Their town’s largest employer, Martin Marietta, eliminated 7,000 jobs—half the company’s local workforce and about 20 percent of the town’s population. By year’s end, more than 1 million square feet of retail and office space sat vacant.

“Every time I go to Market Creek with my kids now, they say ‘We own this,’” says Bevelynn Bravo, a mother of four who lives in a struggling San Diego neighborhood known as the Diamond. Bravo recently took part in a first-of-its-kind initial public offering (IPO), purchasing 25 shares in the Market Creek shopping center at $10 per share. Market Creek Plaza’s developer, the Jacobs Center for Neighborhood Innovation (a foundation), had previously partnered with teams of residents to conceive, design, and plan the new shopping center.

The word "foundation" usually evokes the same stereotypes.

Swanky offices on the upper floors of downtown buildings. And power-suited program officers who write checks to organizations that "serve" people the foundation staff will never meet, but are neatly categorized as "underprivileged," "homeless," or "teen mothers."

Veteran antipoverty activist Maurice Lim Miller had never met Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown. So when Miller's home phone rang late one night in 2000, he was surprised to find one of America's best-known municipal leaders on the line.