Translator: Rhonda Jacobs Reviewer: Ellen Maloney
Hello! (Audience) Hello!
I am the head of a non-profit organization,
and I have been at this work a long time.
And ever since I got started years ago,
the world has changed, and the work has changed,
and they've both gotten a lot harder.
You know, when I started out at this work,
the way that we helped people get out of poverty
was basically to point them in the direction of a good job.
And good jobs were pretty ubiquitous, they were pretty easy to find.
Remember those days?
(Laughs)
You know, we would point people to jobs in construction,
or in manufacturing, or you could go to work for the city,
and, you know, you were set.
And you didn't have to have an advanced education
to get into these jobs.
And when you were in them, they paid enough to support a family.
And if it didn't pay quite enough to support a family,
well, there was a little bit of help
that would be available from the government at the edges
and that would be enough to get you by.
And that was great, you know, a good way to start.
But since that time, there have been a lot of changes
in the world around us.
And we first started seeing this happen a few years ago,
and it kind of got tied up in with the recession,
but basically what we started to see was
major changes in the kind of jobs that were out there.
Now jobs require - that pay a family-sustaining wage -
require education beyond high school.
And in fact, the majority of these jobs,
you have to have at least a couple of years beyond high school
if you want to get a wage that will support a family.
And in the near future it's projected that almost 75 percent of all jobs,
will require education beyond high school.
So, this is really complicating things. It changes the dynamics.
It changes the world of working with low-income families
because suddenly the work that used to be teaching people
how to prepare a resume, or interview for a job,
or find the job to apply for the civil service list, or whatever,
has become a process of helping mostly single parents
who are earning bupkus, earning not enough to pay their rents,
basically try to figure out how to get support
for keeping body and soul together;
at the same time that they have to take care of their kids;
at the same time that they have to go to school,
and have to somehow find their way with that school
into a career that will support them and their families.
And this is the kind of multi-tasking, juggling, time-consuming,
never-getting-ahead, trade-off-making kind of lifestyle
that has to be sustained, and sustained well,
for years and years at a time,
until these families can finally get into those jobs.
And, you know, how do you build programs for that?
How do you build programs for that?
How do you build programs for people who are, every day,
saying, which do I pay, the heat or the light bill?
And what is a FAFSA, anyway?
And what's a credit and a non-credit-bearing course?
And my kid has asthma and just called me, and I have to go get him,
but I have to take a test,
and if I miss another day of work I'm going to lose my job.
And what is an ultrasound technologist or CAD/CAM specialist, anyway?
And how do I even spell this?
And, you know, this kind of process
requires optimizing every decision of every day, year in and year out,
with not an inch tolerance to spare for making the wrong one.
You miss that test and it could be the end.
And it takes the wisdom or the judgment of a Solomon.
And it takes the data set of a Google.
And it takes the persistence of a presidential candidate,
and you have to have a really good flippin' head on your shoulders.
And unfortunately ...
brain science has something to tell us about that.
New emerging brain science has something very important to tell us
about that very process.
Because what that brain science says
is that poverty affects our heads.
Povery affects our heads.
Poverty affects the real wiring, the circuitry in our brains.
It changes our brain circuitry ...
biologically ...
in ways that show up on MRIs.
Poverty affects what are known as our executive functioning skills -
the areas of our brain that allow us to focus,
have memory,
juggle, multi-task, set goals,
follow through, find Plan B.
And those are the areas of the brain that are most affected by poverty itself.
And how does this happen?
Well, it happens in two really, really important ways.
The first one is one that probably all of us understand and know.
When you are in the middle of a high stress set of circumstances,
and you're trying to make decisions and juggle,
and work things wisely,
and maybe something rough has happened to you
that you're dealing with that's consuming a lot of your thinking,
your brain gets swamped.
You know, when I've just backed my car into the garage
and hit my husband's tool set,
that is not the time for my daughter to be coming to me, saying to me,
"Is it alright for me to move in with my boyfriend?"
(Laughter)
You don't want to be making important decisions
right in the middle of that kind of stressful moment.
And scientists tell us that this is something
that is experienced by all of us, and it's what we call a bandwidth tax.
And our brains actually get overloaded,
the circuitry gets overloaded
and it compromises the quality of decision-making in the moment.
So that's the first way.
The second way is a little bit more pernicious.
If we've been raised in poverty,
if we've experienced this kind of stress for years - year in, year out,
our brains actually get built differently.
What happens is, we get wiring that's very sensitized
and built very carefully to react to stresses and dangers,
but the wiring that's responsible for surfacing choices, weighing choices,
thinking about what we want to do in the future,
and what would be good for me, and what's my Plan B?
And the ones that are used to having resources
and weighing how to optimize those resources,
are not built out as well for people who have grown up in poverty
because guess what?
The options haven't been there.
And so what happens is, the very wiring that would allow us
to be able to optimize this very difficult process
of juggling and weighing on a daily basis,
how to optimize our time and our resources,
is the wiring that gets whacked by poverty itself.
The very areas of the brain that we need
are the areas of the brain that poverty compromises.
So this is not good news for people like me, right?
This is not a very nice thing for us to hear about science.
So, why am I smiling?
(Laughs)
I'm smiling because ...
people like me, we can learn new things.
We can re-invent the way that we work.
And the biological sciences, brain science also tells us
that these very parts of the brain
where the executive functioning decisions are made,
are parts of the brain that are special, they remain plastic,
they can be developed well into old age and into adulthood.
In fact, really seriously, you can actually coach,
and you can coach in ways that rebuild the circuitry of the brain itself
in ways that show up on MRIs.
You actually can rebuild brain wiring.
So what do people like me do with that information?
Well, we try to infuse it into the way that we work.
We try to build new coaching models that are looking at how to create
opportunities for families, for women,
to start exercising these skills and building them out,
and making them stronger, and creating this new wiring.
So when you come into our job training programs,
instead of seeing people basically saying, "How do take an interview?
How do you fill out your resume?" How do you do that kind of stuff.
We do that too.
What you're going to see is you're going to see women
who are starting the day
playing cognitive gaming apps!
Playing games on computers that basically help improve memory,
and focus, and decision-making skills, and starting the day that way.
And what you're going to see when you come into our homeless shelters,
our family homeless shelters,
is you're going to see women who are sitting down with counselors,
and instead of a public housing form being pushed across the table to them
and asked to fill out that public housing form,
what's happening with them is that they are getting
brain science-informed scaffolding
that allows them to basically array their problems,
multi-sectored problems.
The issues they're grappling with in their families, in their health,
in their finances, in their career, in their education,
and lay it all out,
and start to tease it apart,
and think about what next step tomorrow could I make
that might leverage change over a longer period of time.
Where do I start? What's the next step I take?
How do I begin to untangle this Gordian knot of poverty?
And this process of beginning to exercise
these decision-making and priority-setting skills
happens in shelter, and it happens over and over again,
and ultimately, the goal is that it happens when we're not even there.
And the scaffolding becomes internal skill sets
that are built over time.
And lives hopefully are changed so that families that are homeless
will not go out into housing and become homeless again.
Now, I realize that what I'm telling you sounds pretty "new agey,"
kind of dreamy schemy, kind of like something the next whack-job
self-help guru with a book to sell is trying to push at you,
I realize that.
But I have to tell you, it is not that at all.
There are major corporations in the United States today
selling billions of dollars of this kind of coaching
to rich college kids who want to get into law school,
who need to have good critical thinking skills
demonstrable on those LSAT tests,
and they sit down, and they take these coaching modules,
and on average they move from the 44th to the 71st percentile
after they've been coached, and ...
friends of mine at Berkeley have taken scans of their brains
that show new wiring built during that intervening 100 hours of coaching
that's demonstrable on brain scans.
Not too dreamy schemey.
We have neurologists across the country in hospitals everywhere,
applying these new kind of techniques
in order to help people who have post-traumatic brain disorders,
or have cognitive impairments due to aging,
and this is being used in those settings across the country as well.
And in early education, these interventions are being used
to change and re-write the way the way we work with young children
to give them a leg up.
So, I have to tell you, this is being used widely,
we just haven't connected the dots in re-writing the war on poverty.
We haven't been taking these skills and saying,
how do we begin to use them to change low-income families' lives?
So, when we started applying these techniques
and started using them within our own families,
I, you know, you think maybe this will give us an edge.
The work is not going well, guys.
In case you haven't noticed it yet,
the issues with poverty are growing, I'm in a growing field.
And we now have a quarter of United States citizens
who are receiving income-related public subsidies.
And the wait-list for housing and childcare subsidies
are years long.
And government is croaking under the increased poverty rates
that we're experiencing in the United States today.
So the work has not been going all that great.
So, we try.
Four years ago, we try.
We start re-writing the way that we're doing our work
with some of the dimensions that I told you about earlier.
And funky stuff starts to happen.
Stuff that we had never seen happen before.
Low-income moms living in public housing, 37 years old average when they start,
people who've been poor a long time,
graduating from community college at twice the rate in half the time
of the average community college student.
Low-income moms buying their own homes at double the rate nationally
of single women across the board of any income category.
One third of these moms getting into family-sustaining jobs
of $45-$50,000 a year within three years,
and still cookin', still truckin'.
Now, I look at that, and that stuff in my long career,
I have never seen before.
And so, I start to think, okay, this is not double blind here,
this isn't randomized controlled trial, but it's good enough for me,
I'm going to keep on using this stuff.
(Laughter)
And so, it grows, it grows.
And 80 percent of the families that we have in shelter
are working or going to school 24 hours a week,
and are saving money.
And 100 percent of the families
that we move out of shelter into the community
are retaining their housing for 18 months or more.
Again, unheard of outcomes.
So, I don't have the holy grail here.
I'm not saying that I have the holy grail here,
but I have to tell you
that I'm going to keep on using what we've got.
Because when our moms move into these jobs, and they get those jobs,
their lives start humming.
And when they get into those jobs that these employers need filled,
the economy starts humming too.
And when their children see them do it,
they watch and they build the skills that they need to grow up and flower,
and live the lives they're intended to lead,
and we get to shove a wedge in that cycle of poverty,
and maybe have a chance to stop it dead in its tracks.
Moms. Families.
Better lives through science, pal.
It's a good thing.
(Applause) (Cheers)