V1-1.01| TWO GIRLS … ON AVERAGE

01| You have two girls of around ten years. Their school performance is average but they cause no problems. They are like I was — with interests outside school. Learning a new dance is a lot more fun than learning that the King of wherever conquered more land wherever. In my case, during the week I was visualizing how I would score three goals on Sunday. One of these girls' parents have money, living a comfortable upper-middle class lifestyle in a well-to-do neighborhood. The other girl lives in a working poor area, stable family but a bad neighborhood (barrio).

Where will these girls end up …. on average?

02| Society loves to highlight those who broke the chains and reached stellar levels, like the Oprah Winfrey Story. The moral of the story is that when you work hard, you can reach the Moon. Sure you can, but fairness in society should be measured by averages, not by the exceptions. A fair society is about level playing fields. In a fair society an average good performance should be rewarded with an average good slot (aka the Middle Class), regardless of the starting position (zip code) ….. on average.

03| Few, if any, societies have developed a really level playing field. That is not a crime. Accepting it as a low priority is a crime. At least, I think so. Even as a young kid, I toyed with the question: what would have become of me if I had been born in Soweto, the south side of Chicago, or a barrio in Medellin? What if my parents had lived there, dealing with the daily stress of surviving — would our home have been as tranquil and stable? How many of my friends would still be alive? My neighborhood was boringly peaceful. I wished somebody would be chasing somebody with a machete down the street. Never happened.

04| In most societies (if not all) it matters dearly what your zip code is. The harsh reality is that — on average — the 'poor' girl with potentially the same agency ends much lower on the food chain than the 'rich' girl. The worst thing of it all is that most people seem to think nothing of it, as if it were set in stone.

05| Both girls have stable families. What the rich girl also has is a floor. If she drifts, if she chooses wrong, if she fails at twenty-five — she does not hit the bottom. Someone catches her. And she knows the middle-class code because she grew up inside it: she has seen the route and she knows the destination is real. The poor girl has neither. Not a worse family — a shorter fall. She cannot afford a bet that takes years to pay off, because nobody is standing behind her if it fails. So the long game stays closed, and staying where she is becomes the only rational option.

06| This makes me mad. If I believe anything, it is that things are NOT set in stone. Poverty is not set in stone. Social mobility is not set in stone. It is a true crime that societies accept these limitations as something natural. It is the main driver to design IkoCiti. I want 10-year-old kids to feel that they have — more or less — the same chance as their richer counterparts. Reality must show them that if they keep it together, they have a realistic chance of ending up somewhere in the middle class, living across the street from that other 10-year-old girl …. on average.

07| IkoCiti does not hand her that future. We hand residents the tools. If they keep the urgency and keep using them, the barrio changes and her odds go up substantially — over time, with setbacks. If the urgency dies, so does the momentum. The odds are built by the people living there. We only make it easier.

RESEARCH & DESIGN

08| IkoCiti is designed unconstrained by mainstream anti-poverty thinking. That was a deliberate choice. By slow-cooking the concept from a blank piece of paper and being a total outsider to the sector, I gave myself the creative freedom to build a Castle in the Sky — a solution not hindered by the limitations of reality like money, dominant strategies or standard procedures. IkoCiti's objective is not to be a run-of-the-mill approach. We are a breakthrough solution or nothing. It is a high-risk approach because the odds are huge that I created something useless.

09| IkoCiti could be a breakthrough concept and useless at the same time. A brilliant concept that nobody adopts is as useless as a dumb idea nobody adopts. In this book, we make the case that IkoCiti is the best theoretical concept around. Even if we make a strong claim, adoption is far from certain. The potential funders are part of the current industry and they have committed themselves to specific approaches. But who knows — maybe some of them are looking for a new way.

10| At some point, every serious idea has to confront the world as-is. The way we do it is different. Instead of trying to sell and hype IkoCiti, we will be searching for better alternatives. Societies should make Big Bets — really Big Bets — on new, innovative and breakthrough models, instead of continuing with many of the current approaches. These approaches shave off the hard edges of poverty but they do not structurally penetrate the cancer cells of poverty.

11| In other words, societies must put big money on the best breakthrough solutions. They must do so because the focus should be on the people chained by poverty, not on those who make money providing the 'solutions' (aka services). If IkoCiti cannot honestly qualify as a breakthrough model for (non-crisis) urban generational poverty, then RIP IkoCiti. We bury it with a smile because we will be closer to a solution with other and better models, and that is good for people in poverty.

RESEARCH WITH A FOCUS

12| Poverty is a complex and hugely diverse issue. IkoCiti focuses only on an important part of the whole problem: barrios with demonstrated high rates of (non-crisis) urban generational poverty. We are the last-mile solution of a chain. Poor people are best served when that chain also contains [i] (strong) economic growth at the national level; [ii] sound national anti-poverty policies; and [iii] positive commitment at the regional and local levels. IkoCiti does not wait for any of it. We work with what is there. With one exception — we do need a feeling of urgency among barrio residents to get into the game themselves. Without that, we do not go in.

13| We work with our members only. We empower them with advanced resources but we do not replace society or government. We are not a social service. We offer the tools that make organizing easier — and what residents do with them, within reasonable limits, is up to them. If they see people in the barrio falling through the cracks, they can build a project around it: push the local government to do a better job, come up with a solution together, support it with their own projects. That is residents using their power; they are the driving force, not IkoCiti. And if residents and the local government have different priorities than helping the most vulnerable, then we cannot do anything about that. We are the tools, not the decision-makers.

14| This volume surveys the areas of poverty that affect IkoCiti the most. We do not attempt to capture poverty in all of its dimensions. We are not academics. We are builders who roll out strategies to build better realities. The research scope is to analyze those factors that affect IkoCiti once launched on the cold grounds of reality. It is the start of our Reconnaissance Mission, or RECON — the continuous search for better answers. There are three phases in our perpetual RECON:

• [i] the Pre-Operational RECON (now);

• [ii] the Pre-Proof RECON (after the launch but before proof-of-concept);

• [iii] the Post-Proof RECON (to keep making things better as part of our DNA).

15| Which realities will hit IkoCiti when launching? And how are others dealing with the same issues? And why do they choose the answers they choose? Who is benefitting by maintaining the Status Quo? Are societies really focused on fighting poverty? Can we truly empower poor people to begin to solve their own problems in the barrio? Can we truly create a self-perpetuating system in which local people help themselves by helping others? Is the bureaucratic thinking of those allocating the monies prepared to do business with ambitious residents in their efforts to create — over time — a safer and better barrio that acts as a substantially better jumping board for the next generations? Why is the industry ruled by short-term thinking?

POVERTY VS INEQUALITY

16| We live in a world where a US$1,000,000 bank account feels like losing, because somebody else has a thousand times more. We no longer talk about the Greedy 1% but about the Evil 0.1%. To somebody living off 1 dollar a day or 10 dollars a day, there is no difference between having US$1,000,000 and having US$1,000,000,000,000. In rich countries, many people feel like they got the short end of the stick, regardless of the fact that they objectively benefit from the highest living standards in the world.

17| The paradox of the middle class is that expectations and entitlements grow faster than income and assets. And those who complain about inequality and affordability have a real case — the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few does not serve society well. But wealth inequality is not poverty, and therefore falls outside the IkoCiti scope. Fighting poverty does not end inequality; it lifts the floor of inequality to a higher level.

18| For IkoCiti what matters is more people with more real opportunities — to find a barrio model that allows people to create more opportunities for themselves and for others. IkoCiti creates small local markets of labor opportunities, which allows people to gain more Smartz and business-type experience, which helps them individually to seek higher-paying employment outside the IkoCiti framework.

19| At the barrio level, a growing talent pool with a lets-get-things-done mentality makes residents more competitive for jobs outside the barrio. Inside the barrio, a safer street with more money circulating is what makes small local businesses open — and preferable zoning policies from the local government make that a lot easier. And a place where people visibly do good things builds a reputation. Outsiders start pricing the risk of that barrio differently. That is momentum, and momentum attracts. Of course this doesn't happen overnight. It is a multi-generational play.

20| I also believe that a cohort of people who take the lead on issues works deep and in intangible ways. I cannot prove it. That is what the RECON is for.

21| One thing is sure. IkoCiti does not turn ghettos into posh, suburban areas filled with Audis, swimming pools and people playing hockey or cricket. What it must deliver is the smart tools that allow residents to build social progress. They must feel the change in their guts — undeniable and tangible. The challenge for the Maveriqs (residents) is to create an ongoing momentum of positive change, which must give people the psychological boost that things are possible. A door to a better future that might not be wide open, but with a little pushing opens up.

22| Our job is to build the tools that facilitate their actions, and the research we do is to find better answers to the many questions a venture like IkoCiti must answer. Those questions vary from technical, legal and psychological to leadership or ownership issues. To state it plainly: research analysis is a critical success factor that drives the different stages of our RECON. It means one thing in simple terms — keep learning always.

THE END