 Next to the stage will be Mauricio L. Miller, a Mexican American social entrepreneur, public speaker and author based in Oakland, California. He's the founder of the nonprofit organization Family Independence Initiative, but above all, he is a believer in the firsthand experience, wisdom and leadership of the poor. Mauricio was born in a border town in Mexico and later moved to San Jose with his mom and sister. His mother sacrificed everything to send Mauricio to college where he came to recognize that there was a very different world for those he went to school with. It was in school and afterward that Miller would focus his efforts on growing an economy from the bottom up. When I asked him why he's still at it backstage just now, he said, I really think we might have a shot at changing this crazy top-down system. Mauricio is here to share a vision of a world in which three-fourths of our global population who live in poverty are recognized as the contributors they already are and a future in which their vision and their own liberation acts as a guiding light towards change. Please welcome to the stage Mauricio Miller. Thank you. Thank you much. Hi, good morning. I'm really happy to be here and I'm half awake, but so my name is kind of confusing. As he mentioned, I was actually from Mexico and Miller is my mother's name. My father's last name was Lim and it just got thrown in there, but my mother divorced my father when I was two years old by basically having him jailed for attempted murder and then I was raised by her. So as my sister and I, and we came up to San Jose, California, everything was sacrificed so that one kid could go through college, ended up going to UC Berkeley and entered a very different world. So for my mother, the difficulty was that she was seen in a very stereotypical way. She was a Mexican mother, single mom, third grade education. People thought she wasn't very smart, she didn't make good decisions. At this point, they think she was a criminal or a rapist, but how she should have been seen is that she was actually a really talented designer, wonderful seamstress, very hardworking and that somehow or other, there was no system in the United States that actually recognized that side of her and that's what was really upsetting to her. She was not here to get charity or to have direction from somebody else as to how to raise her kids, certainly not from my father. So somehow or other, she was very disappointed with the United States and things did not go well and so everything concentrated on me. So the dilemma was that she fell into the stereotype that exists here and worldwide, which is that people are stuck in poverty, that there's something wrong with them, that they don't know how to make good decisions or they're lazy or they're potential criminals and this issue of being stuck in poverty is so untrue. Even the Census Bureau comes up that only in the United States only about 3% stay in poverty for more than three years and that is hugely different than the 15% that you hear about being stuck in poverty. That means people are doing something and if they're doing something, we don't seem to have a system that recognizes what they do. What we do is we have a system that tries to recognize what they don't do and what they can't do or what they're weak at or what the needs are and then we invest and we invest in ways that make sense for us to then be the helper and so for her that made no sense, that really what she needed is a system that would look at her talents and so this is kind of the Census Bureau that has been doing these studies for ages and then if you go to countries like Liberia that I just came back from, almost everybody is doing something. The economy there is totally devastated with the Civil War or Ebola and you don't see people laying down dying on the street. You actually see them working together, again against the stereotypes. Before any of us existed and there were any programs or social impact investors, people formed entire towns, microeconomies and so this was kind of the history that my mother actually came to this country for and somehow or other that wasn't happening and in many ways I think our sector contributes to keeping what people do really invisible because all the focus is on what we do and what we can do and there was one story that I read about that I think it might have been in Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma where there was a barber who started a barber shop and his cousin learned how to cut hair and started a barber shop in another town and in the other town his brother then was doing construction and started then a construction company that then started hiring other people and this is how the black townships were really developed is that person to person people pulling their dollars and what you ended up seeing is that in Oklahoma alone after slavery they built 50 townships and ultimately they built the black colleges and whatever. A more contemporary example for me was that in the 90s and early 2000s if you would walk into a donut shop in California you would see Cambodians running the donut shops and Cambodians came to own 80 to 90% of the donut shops in California and how did that happen? And so a reporter went back and he found this one person Ted Neu who had worked at Winchell's Donuts learned how to run a donut shop then started his own donut shop worked with two cousins start their own donut shops and then those were the early adopters off of his talent and then that idea of starting donut shops start spreading throughout the Cambodian community and this is really how things spread and that's what is really important for us to learn because we keep thinking that somehow or other we replicate programs in our systems that work for us, it's gonna work but actually humans are really different that they tend to follow one another and so the slide which went off I don't want to look at me. Anyway, so there's this whole issue called diffusion of innovation, okay? So read about diffusion of innovation it's basically tipping point. So if you want something to scale with humans you need to understand diffusion of innovation which means there has to be some positive deviant there have to be early adopters that test it this is how Facebook got tested at Harvard and ultimately then you start getting the initial majority that actually starts scaling something so humans actually scale things very, very differently. One of the stories in terms of probably the best document that I've heard of is how many of you have heard about the Save the Children project in Vietnam around nutrition? Well, a few of you have. So what happened was that the Vietnamese government had realized that nutrition was a huge problem in the villages and so they asked Save the Children to come in and sure enough nutrition was huge for the children. And what they had trouble figuring out is okay well what could be indigenous solutions because you couldn't bring the solutions from the US and they found that there were two or three families in the three or four villages that they were studying that actually their kids were doing fine and they discovered that those families were positive deviance. They were doing something a little bit differently in terms of what they used for the food and how often they fed their children. So then they went back to the Vietnamese government and said okay we discovered a solution can we bring it in, have teachers, and all you know to a big program and the Vietnamese government said there's not enough money for that. So they went back to the villages and they decided to do is actually get those three families that were doing it in a certain way and say could you teach the rest of the villagers and then when you teach those to the villagers could some of them go to the next village and teach them. So all of the teaching actually was passing forward. And in that then within I think it was seven years I may have all this screwed up but like nutrition of 50,000 children actually once it actually start catching on then all of a sudden other people actually found that they could actually change that and so that was one of the best documented in terms of positive deviance. Oh great go back. Okay so my biggest experience was really with Javier and Maria. So I started a project called Family Independence Initiative which was really to try to capture the data on a monthly basis of what families do for themselves and how they help each other. Jerry Brown helped me to start this program. It was basically we gave every family a computer. We had them work together and they documented what they did and one of the groups of families because we only enrolled families in their groups with their friends. Javier and Maria actually regularly said nothing at the meetings that we had to find out what they were doing and one day my staff comes in and says well Javier and Maria ran into the Spanish speaking real estate agent who promised them he could actually help them buy this house at the end of the block and we think he's a predatory lender. Can we say anything? So my project with Jerry Brown was set up to not interfere. What we wanted was clean data as to what families were capable of doing for themselves and for each other. So I told my staff no you can't say anything just leave them alone. So my staff was not very happy because at the end the real estate agent and broker makes money and closing. He got them to closing but their mortgage payment was 65% of their income. My staff comes to me and says at 65% of their income because our data system collects all of the financial and other information says they're gonna lose the house and I'm over there yeah, they're gonna lose the house and I felt really bad but then the lesson started. So somewhere along the line Javier and Maria are not stupid. They figured out this guy was a scam artist. They wasn't made off but he was a scam artist and so they then got a refinance clause put in the contract. They then had all the friends that they had borrowed money from descend on the house, repayment, retail that re-landscape it got the valuation up had a refinance that I sat in on got their payments down to 40% and at 40% with the rest of these families surrounding them there's no way they were gonna lose that house. They still own that house. This was in 2001. Okay so that was the first lesson. My staff could never have actually solved or come up with that kind of solution. The second thing is that our data system gives us feedback as to what people do and the red line for savings start going up for the other five families in that cohort. So I went to the meeting and asked them so how come you guys are saving? And they turned over to Javier and Maria and said well if they can buy a house we can buy a house. 18 months later all the other five families own homes in the United States that until that role model came up they did not think it was possible to create an asset in the United States so they had been sending all their savings back to El Salvador. In that process 5,000 came from El Salvador in this direction. So that was the second lesson. And then they said so other families that are not in our cohort but are from the refugee community from the war in El Salvador they're starting to buy homes. So I'm so well there's really three lessons. Fast forward to about a year and a half ago I told that story at Stanford and after telling the story there was a young man came up to me he said so you know my family's from El Salvador and my mother heard about your family's buying homes and so we bought a house and it's the equity from that house that got me through Stanford. So that piece about the ripple was something that actually had happened generationally and that again my staff could never have created. So those are the things that we should be looking at is the self-grown role modeling that actually tends to be going on. The one that happened and really what I feel like in order to prove this out I was visiting Liberia and I'd mentioned it before so that economy infrastructure everything was devastated in the Civil War and with Ebola and so as we were going through these different places we were running into groups of families that had formed associations. One was where fishermen there was another association people making mats that would go into houses or the flooring and then there was another association that actually was a lumber yard but when we first got to this lumber yard it was really pretty big and as we were actually walking into the dirt floors and off the dirt road that we start seeing a man carrying a piece of lumber on his shoulder and then we saw somebody else with a wheelbarrow kind of carrying out sawdust and then as we walk further in we saw a red cross over here that might have been their pharmacy and then on the right hand side we saw a man sitting on a pile of lumber then a woman sitting on a different pile of lumber saw somebody making doors on this side people cooking on this side got to the back there was a big saw that they said that somebody had connections to the US was able to get that saw so they could cut the trees and that every other Wednesday that there was somebody in the northern villages where the trees were that would go up in the mountaintop wherever their cell phone signal and they would tell them how many trees they needed and that person knew the people that could cut the tree and then who could truck it up here this was really elaborate right and so then I'm asking him so who runs this who owns this business and they said nobody so it turns out that in order to run this thing it was an association where they cooperatively formed this business and it was a hundred and thirty two families running this whole thing now that kind of resourcefulness you don't see even among the privileged so somehow or other you know there these are the things that we need to see we need to see what my mother's talent was we need to see what all of these talents are but we have no mechanism for really recognizing it and for building it so the piece that I want to leave you with is that I think things are changing so I started that project the family independence initiative to show that the capacity was actually there in the neighborhoods fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years ago now I think things are changing I mean there has to be some frustration that after more than fifty years of the war on poverty we have not closed the wealth and income gap and so we have to look at some things fundamentally wrong and so what's the biggest untapped asset and the biggest untapped asset are really the people themselves we got three quarters of the population almost six billion people living in and around poverty and we don't know their talents we don't have a mechanism to invest in them so big experiment is going to be happening a coalition is being put together and we are going to change an economy a full economy from the ground up we're going to invest in those lumber yards we're going to invest in that making things in the fishermen all of these associations so the investments are going to be anywhere from two hundred dollars to five thousand in the first tier and we'll have actually different tiers of funding as these businesses grow and what we're going to do is run the economics to watch in particular Liberia is probably the biggest target for us we will be able to see a movement of how you can grow an economy from the ground up and prove that actually the people themselves have the best ideas and that we don't have to just give tax breaks to the rich or to the corporations that actually what we need is to invest on the ground and actually have the tiers of funding so that they actually can move up and break past a lot of these barriers that we have artificially created so that's a big opportunity I will be signing books around noon wherever the book thing is and I would love any advice and any discussion that people want to have around that so thank you and let's change it