LIFT

LIFT’s mission is to combat poverty and expand opportunity for all people in the United States. We envision a day when all people in our country will have the opportunity to achieve economic security and pursue their aspirations.

LIFT is a growing movement to combat poverty and expand opportunity for all people in the United States. LIFT currently runs centers staffed by trained volunteers in Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC, to serve low-income individuals and families.

LIFT clients and volunteers work one-on-one to find jobs, secure safe and stable housing, make ends meet through public benefits and tax credits, and obtain quality referrals for services like childcare and healthcare. Simultaneously, the LIFT experience pushes volunteers to grapple with our country's most challenging issues related to poverty, race, inequality, and policy. Since LIFT's founding, over 6,000 volunteers have served more than 40,000 individuals and families.

More than 46 million Americans—one in six individuals—live below the poverty line.¹ According to the federal poverty measure, a family of four is considered below the poverty line if it earns less than $22,050 a year.² This translates into an average of $15 per person per day to cover all needs, from food and bus fare to doctor’s appointments and utility bills.

The implausibility of living on this amount of money in America today is alarming, but even more concerning is the reality that the number of Americans living in poverty have and will significantly—and precipitously—grow in the coming months and years as the economic downturn is fully realized.³

Poverty is a complex and multi-faceted problem and all of its associated issues—unemployment, homelessness, hunger, illiteracy, health care costs, and more—are interlinked.  Yet our social services system does not reflect this reality.  In order to secure needed resources, poor families must navigate highly complex and confusing bureaucracies, making access to basic services and benefits challenging.

On the policy front, we have failed to make the elimination of domestic poverty a national priority despite the amount we as a country know about the persistence and growth of poverty in the United States.  We have not prioritized the necessary policies and investments that could pull millions of families out of poverty.

¹ “Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2010,” U.S. Census Bureau
² “The 2009 HHS Poverty Guidelines: One Version of the [U.S.] Federal Poverty Measure,”  U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
³ ”Simulating the Effect of the ‘Great Recession’ on Poverty,” Emily Monea and Isabel V. Sawhill, The Brookings Institution

LIFT believes that although poverty is complicated, getting help should not have to be.

With a mission to combat poverty and expand opportunity for all people in the United States, LIFT’s model pursues two distinct paths.  First, low-income individuals (clients) work with trained volunteers to obtain access to necessities—secure income, housing, health care, and education—that enable families to survive and thrive.  LIFT’s services are free of cost and without eligibility requirements, ensuring that any individual in need can access resources.

Second, LIFT trains a corps of volunteers in a variety of issue areas to prepare them to work within the context of client needs.  Their exposure to the challenges presented to low-income families serves as a transformative experience, and LIFT alumni go on to pursue careers across all sectors and become lifelong leaders in the effort to improve the practices and policies that aim to eliminate poverty.

LIFT is committed to combating the multi-generational cycle of poverty by providing comprehensive services to families in need. The significant education achievement gap that exists between students living in poverty and their higher-income peers is unacceptable. Research demonstrates that a child’s academic performance improves significantly when his or her family has stable income, safe housing, healthcare coverage, and sufficient access to nutritious food, yet support for the parents of children living in poverty continues to be far too limited in all of our communities.

LIFT has made it a priority to bolster student achievement by connecting parents to services, supports, and benefits that can place low-income families on the road to economic opportunity. LIFT sees five essential asset areas—basic necessities, employment/financial stability, housing, education and training, and health care—as vital to individual and family security and success.  By working one-on-one with LIFT volunteers to find jobs, secure safe and stable housing, make ends meet through public benefits and tax credits, and obtain quality referrals for services like childcare and health care, LIFT client families are able to holistically address their immediate and long-term needs while making concrete steps towards realizing their greater dreams and aspirations.

In the process of working toward their goals, LIFT clients develop an important  internal “toolkit” for progress and resiliency that enables them to move forward independently and bounce back from challenges and setbacks. With the support of LIFT volunteers, clients strengthen their goal-setting abilities, problem-solving skills, knowledge of key community resources, self-confidence, and ability to advocate for themselves and their families.

Since 2009, LIFT has piloting its school-based approach to client service in the Chicago Pilsen community, the Columbia Heights neighborhood of DC, and most recently the Roxbury and Somerville communities of Greater Boston. With the success of these pilots, LIFT is examining strategies to roll out larger school-based strategies in connection with our cities’ public school systems and charter school networks so that LIFT can best serve at-risk children and their parents across the country.

At LIFT, our work is guided by a core set of principles and we aim to see these values reflected in our organizational culture, from the services we provide to the people we recruit.

Diversity: We believe that diversity in all dimensions of the organization is essential to achieving our mission.

Human Potential: We recognize the inherent dignity, value, and potential of each person and are dedicated to empowering all people to reach their potential.

Relationships: We believe in a simple idea: that the support found in individualized, personalized relationships is the engine for overcoming complex challenges.

Collaboration: We collaborate with our clients, community partners, and one another to facilitate individual and community transformation.

Sense of possibility: With optimism and persistence, LIFT inspires a belief that all ideas should be welcomed and all goals are attainable.

Service: We believe that when young people and volunteers of all ages are launched into a transformative service experience, that experience creates a lifelong commitment to service and changing the world.

At LIFT, our approach to achieving our mission is collaborative. Staff, clients, student leaders, and partners work together to find solutions to the complicated issue of poverty in our country. We believe that diversity in all dimensions of the organization supports and bolsters the innovative thinking essential to LIFT’s success.

To us, “diversity” is defined as the full participation, inclusion, engagement and empowerment of individuals from different races, ethnicities, genders, gender identities, sexual orientations, national origins, socio-economic backgrounds, ages, physical abilities, religious beliefs, political beliefs, ideologies, and other attributes that make each of us unique. We work mindfully and deliberately to create a culturally competent workplace to support the work we do as a team and as a model of the inclusive, equitable society that we strive to achieve.