LIFT asked Carlos how his experience with LIFT shaped his college career, his pursuits after graduation, and his philosophy on the importance of working to address domestic poverty.
What attracted you to LIFT?
LIFT’s holistic model of service stuck out the most to me, as well as the neighborhood immersion. The confidence (some might call it audacity) to insert a bunch of college kids into a community and tell them to do everything was something I had never heard of or seen before, and the level of engagement with the issues they purported to confront really piqued my interest.
Can you give an example of when you personally confronted those issues and achieved success?
I worked with one older, but not of retirement age, client who had been looking for a job for almost a year when she found LIFT-Philadelphia. She had plenty of experience as a nursing home attendant, but was not really able to locate the resources necessary to find work. We sharpened her résumé, worked together with her to learn to use the computer to search for jobs, sent out tons of résumés with cover letters, followed up on our work countless times, set up several interviews, and finally landed her a job.
The problem wasn’t one of ability, but of access and scale. She didn’t have access to a computer, and that lack of information-gathering ability really hurt her chances to hit up employers on a broad enough scale to garner success. Let’s say we sent out around 40 résumés, followed up with all of them, got about five interviews, and pulled two job offers from that. That’s a five percent success rate, bearing in mind that, because we’re doing this on the web, we’re catching these jobs immediately as they become open. Compare this to a paper search. You’re limited to your neighborhood paper, you find postings later than other people, you have to snail mail in a résumé and wait on a phone call, and only then can you start to work on job offers. A five percent success rate, at that volume of application, is totally discouraging, especially when you see electronic applicants scoring jobs left and right. What she hadn’t been able to do in a year, for lack of access, we were able to do in around a month.
What skills did you learn from working at LIFT?
I learned to talk confidently with just about anybody. I discovered that open and honest communication with no pretext and asking plenty of questions were the best ways to make a connection with someone.
Maybe more importantly, I learned how stop and listen to people. The first thing we were taught at LIFT was that people are going to surprise you – in their dreams in their abilities, in their perceptions, in every way you can imagine. Writing someone off not only cuts them off from you, but it cuts you off from an interaction that may have been more beneficial than you ever could have imagined. This listening is more than just hearing the person, but seeing how they act, what they don’t say, where they lead a conversation, what piques their interest, any cue you can get to really hear what they’re trying to communicate to you. You have to be engaged in a give-and-take if you’re going to get somewhere with someone else—that was the biggest skill set I took from my time in West Philly.
What insight or knowledge did your LIFT experience provide?
LIFT showed me that there is a world of systemic inequality, where liberty and fairness are conditioned notions, where gumption and bootstrapping aren’t all it takes to succeed. I had always thought that all it took to do what you wanted was to establish a goal and pursue it. Hard work would take you where you wanted to be. This belief hardened me to the plight of others, pushed me away from sympathy, led me to see things in an every-man-for-himself light. My obligations were, thus to myself, and each other to herself, a world of independently empowered—and individually failed—actors. LIFT-Philadelphia changed that dramatically. I saw (and was given a vehicle through which to internalize academic learning from my class) how systemic poverty works, how people become disadvantaged, how these systems are self-reinforcing and cyclical, and how charity doesn’t work for the giver or the receiver. I learned that capacity-building is the best way to help people and the only real way to incorrect imbalances of functional liberty. Solutions are complex, society-wide, and will demand a lot from those committed to them. I learned that there a charitable class, as givers or receivers, cannot exist if we are to have a truly equal society. I saw that oppression is alive and well in our country, thriving and feeding on lives, disenfranchising citizens and hollowing our core national values.
But I learned, moreover, that cycles are only that: series of events that are self-perpetuating. As such, anyone can influence them, alter them, force them into new patterns. Small changes in capacity, new options, altered perspectives, real solutions: these are the things that break cycles. LIFT showed me that there is almost no lost cause, that there is no fight too big to be taken on one person at a time. LIFT convinced me that change is necessary, possible, and change is my duty now. Once the absolute moral and ethical necessity of this work became apparent to me, I couldn’t shy from my responsibility. My goals, my vision for myself, the legacy I wanted to leave, all these shifted involuntarily over my two years with LIFT. I was left a changed man, driven and focused, inspired and vocal. I found a path on Osage Road (the former address of LIFT-Philadelphia’s West Office), and I haven’t looked back since.
