S.01 | The deal 01| IkoCiti makes a business agreement with people in the barrio to start a business together as equal partners. The objective is to monetize social progress produced by the efforts of those same people. Together we produce Peoples' Impact, and Peoples' Impact is a service that can be sold. 02| The deal has three sides — a tri-partite collaboration. The people in the barrio who want to improve their lives, the Ambitious Poor, produce. The platform organizes, c

S.01 | The elephant 01| Let me deal with one of the elephants immediately. Yes, poor people — too many of them — do not act in their own self-interest. They make things worse through their behavior, their decisions, their choices. By the way, they are not the only ones who do that. 02| But hurting your own chances is not the cause of poverty. It is the effect of poverty. The careful separation of cause and effect is the critical component in any thinking about poverty. Withou

S.01 | Freedom without opportunity 01| Being a free human with no economic opportunities is like running with no legs. 02| I define independence as a person's ability to take advantage of opportunities. If there are no opportunities, a person cannot be independent. Freedom means being able to choose between different paths and carve out a journey based on your talent and your drive. Where there is nothing to choose between, the freedom is formal and nothing else. 03| The Civi

S.01 | The condition 01| Any solution to generational poverty that does not turn into a self-propelling system will fail. Not probably. Completely. This is the condition the current industry does not meet and, in its present form, cannot meet. 02| Self-propelling means the barrio expands without additional professional help. Maveriqs recruit and teach new Maveriqs. Those recruit and teach the next ones. The area covered grows, the talent pool deepens, the projects get bigger

S.01 | The concession 01| Let me concede the obvious first. Given the same project, professionals will outperform inexperienced local people. Of course they will. They are professionals for a reason, and pretending otherwise would discredit everything else we claim. 02| And yet Peoples' Impact produces more impact. Not better projects — more impact. The two are not the same thing, and the whole argument sits in the gap between them. S.02 | Where the value stays 03| Structural

S.01 | A test, not a label 01| Not every social project counts as Peoples' Impact. The label gets attached to a lot of work that has not earned it, and that loose usage is part of why the sector has produced so much activity and so little structural change. Peoples' Impact is a specific category with a specific test. Ten principles. Miss one and the work may still be valuable — but it is not Peoples' Impact. S.02 | The relationship between the platform and the people 02| The

S.01 | A generational problem 01| Generational poverty is a generational parasite. You do not break it with a cute three-year social impact project. Three-year grant cycles produce three-year solutions, and a solution that expires is not a solution — it is a pause. 02| So once a strategy is set for a barrio, it has to be guaranteed for fifteen to twenty-five years. Not funded year by year against results. Guaranteed. Anything shorter tells everyone involved that the thing wil