A Leader’s Unorthodox Antipoverty Ideas Win Him a ‘Genius’ Prize

Maurice Lim Miller leads an antipoverty group that has never applied for support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. So the phone call he received a few weeks ago from MacArthur’s president, Robert Gallucci, was anything but expected.

“The first thing he asked me was, ‘Are you alone?’” recalls Mr. Lim Miller, who was indeed alone, sitting at a desk in his Oakland, Calif., home.

“I thought it was a strange question. But he’s the president of the foundation. He can ask whatever he wants.”

When Mr. Gallucci revealed his top-secret news—that Mr. Lim Miller was one of 23 recipients this year of the foundation’s $500,0000 no-strings-attached fellowships, known as the “genius” grants—the social-service leader says he started laughing.

“It was really a great surprise,” says Mr. Lim Miller, 66. “I’m still laughing.”

Mr. Lim Miller’s 11-year-old nonprofit, the Family Independence Initiative, won the attention of MacArthur because of its unconventional approach. It tries to help low-income families improve their lives, not by pairing them with professional caseworkers but by encouraging them to turn for support to relatives, friends, and neighbors.

Instead of following directions set by a social worker, family members set their own goals. They receive small cash awards as they make progress.

For years, Mr. Lim Miller struggled to win foundation support, even as his group began to record strong results. More recently, Family Independence Initiative has gained traction and won money to expand its work from Oakland to San Francisco; Oahu, Hawaii; and Boston. It raised $2.3-million last year, most of it from foundations.

But Mr. Lim Miller says people still misinterpret the group as a cash-incentive program rather than a true shake-up of services for the working poor.

The MacArthur award, he says, might change that.

“It’s a game changer,” he says. “We’ve been kind of swimming against the current for 10 years. We have the data. I know it works. But our work is counterintuitive. This kind of credibility will, I think, get people who are skeptical to really stop and think about some of the core pieces that are essential to this work.”

He says he will use some of the MacArthur money to further his efforts, perhaps by testing how prefabricated, factory-built homes can function as a solution to the challenge of providing low-cost housing and by introducing his antipoverty approach abroad.

Says Mr. Lim Miller: “A lot of doors are opening for us, and we’ll try to take advantage of that.”