On Wednesday, Mumbai suffered three more bomb blasts in which 17 people died. Many crucial facts, including the identities of the killers, are not yet known. Indian citizens deserve answers to their many legitimate questions. So far, Indian officials seem to be reacting in a measured and responsible way.

Pakistani leaders condemned the bombings. But words are cheap. They need to work with their Indian counterparts to find whoever is responsible. If Pakistanis were behind this latest horror, Islamabad must ensure that they are brought to justice this time.

Pakistani officials previously acknowledged that the 2008 attacks were partly planned on their soil by Pakistani extremists. Instead of cooperating with India’s investigation, they insisted on handling the case themselves. Pakistan has four suspects in custody, but the trial is moving too slowly to be considered credible. Pakistani courts are notorious for acquitting most terrorism suspects.

By Thursday, no group had claimed responsibility for the latest attack. And with so much riding on it, Indian officials were right to not jump to conclusions. “We are not pointing a finger at this stage,” said Palaniappan Chidambaram, India’s home minister. A senior American law enforcement official said early signs suggested the culprits could well be India-based militants.

After 2008, relations between India and Pakistan plunged into a dangerous two-year freeze. The countries only recently revived a dialogue; we are encouraged that Indian officials say they plan to proceed with talks set for later this month. President Obama has offered American investigative help to India. He and his advisers also need to be having blunt conversations with Pakistan about the cost of any more foot-dragging.

Indians are angry and asking why their government did not ensure their safety. Indian officials say they have made significant security reforms but it may never be possible to stop all terrorist attacks. That is true, but New Delhi still must learn from this experience and keep trying to perfect its intelligence and counterterrorism efforts.

After the 2008 attacks, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh warned that his country would retaliate if hit again. We applaud his continued restraint and urge both sides to think hard about the horrifying cost of a war.

Last month police officers in Midtown cracked down and asked many trucks to leave their spots. Everyone is blaming a court case in May, in which a New York State Supreme Court justice reinforced a regulation saying that no “vendor, hawker or huckster” can sell merchandise from a vehicle parked in a metered space. But although enforcement was scattershot, that regulation has been used against Midtown food trucks for decades.

The crackdown’s real catalyst was the recent explosion of high-end food trucks in Midtown. For the first time, blocks were host to three or four trucks at once. And instead of the old-school food vendors, who are often immigrants used to navigating the gray areas of the business, most of these trucks were operated by a new breed of entrepreneur looking to capitalize on what (falsely) appeared to be the hippest, most profitable trend in the food business.

Food truck regulations have always been purposefully vague and selectively enforced in New York City. The government does not want to strip the city of one of its treasures (can you imagine a New York without hot dogs?) nor can it fully legalize street vending, because opening up hundreds of rent-free spots would damage the real estate economy.

So street vendors and the city long ago struck a tacit deal: the city allows vendors to sell food but reserves the right to kick them out of practically any spot at any time, and vendors keep their heads down, careful not to upset their relationships with the nearby brick-and-mortar businesses, with the police, and with each other. When disputes come up, vendors compromise or move. 

Many of the new food trucks’ operators have ignored these unwritten rules. Some early entrants onto the scene, like the Treats Truck and Wafels Dinges, spent months cultivating spots and relationships, which allowed them to settle into areas that were previously unoccupied. But many new trucks have taken the quicker route, parking where others have found success rather than trying to create a space of their own.

As a result brick-and-mortar business owners who tolerated one truck out front one or two days a week started seeing more and more each day, and eventually got fed up and called the police. Even as an ardent food truck supporter, I find it hard not to sympathize. They pay high rents, only to see food trucks parking free on their doorsteps. There is no denying that the increase in food trucks is unsustainable. 

Some are tempted to look to other cities, like Los Angeles, arguably the birthplace of the high-end food truck trend, for solutions. But it is facing an almost identical situation. Mexican vendors called loncheros spent years working out a compromise with the city that allowed them to sell food without interfering with brick-and-mortar businesses, but a wave of fancy food trucks parking in high traffic areas led to a similar crackdown.

Portland, Ore., which has become a mecca for street-food lovers, rents out spots in privately owned parking lots to vendors. But those food trucks operate more like restaurants than street vendors. New York is trying something similar in a Queens parking lot and under the High Line, an elevated park in Manhattan, but it won’t do much good for trucks or lunchers in the city’s more crowded areas.

Some vendors and food-truck fans are circulating a petition asking the city to change the parking rule. But even if it does, other regulations still make most Midtown parking spots off limits. As tempting as it is to try to change New York City’s laws and establish clear rules for vendors, it’s not likely to happen. And it shouldn’t.

Vendors and fans are actually better served by the status quo. New York’s street food scene is unique and vibrant precisely because it exists in that legal gray area. Traditionally only immigrant and small mom-and-pop businesses were willing to risk the city’s intermittent crackdowns. The vague rules have long deterred any passionless big businesses looking for the next lucrative franchise. Turn street spots into legal real estate controlled by the city, and it will be only a matter of time before street food becomes just as bland and generic as that of any fast-food restaurant in Midtown. 

So instead of fighting to change the laws, vendors who are passionately committed to their food trucks should do what street hawkers in New York have always done after big crackdowns like this one: wait for it to end and then return to Midtown bit by bit, in a way that is respectful to the rent-paying businesses. Or ditch the truck and open a brick-and-mortar business. It’s the way New York street food has endured for the past 150 years, and the only way it will be here for 150 more.

Zach Brooks runs the Web site Midtown Lunch.

THE new secretary of defense, Leon E. Panetta, will soon face the challenge of significantly reducing the Pentagon’s budget. As directed by President Obama, he will have to find at least $400 billion of savings over the next 12 years, or $33 billion per year — about 5 percent of the current annual defense budget. His decisions will reshape our armed forces for decades to come and determine whether we live in a more or less dangerous world.

Having overseen the preparation and execution of the defense budget, I urge Mr. Panetta to resist the temptation to quickly kill procurement programs and research and development activities. Nor should he make proportional cuts to programs across the board. History shows that this would result in a hollowed-out force that will embolden our enemies. It’s the easiest way to go, but also the worst.

Instead, Mr. Panetta should first cut the department’s civilian workforce before reducing the size of the military force. The Pentagon rightly pressures industry to reduce overhead costs, but it is far more inefficient itself. Starting in 2003, the number of active military sailors was reduced by over 60,000, but efforts to cut the Navy’s civilian workforce failed due to onerous government and union rules and regulations. Mr. Panetta should seek blanket authority from Congress to shrink the Pentagon bureaucracy. Cutting 100,000 of 700,000 is a reasonable target. And there should be no additional outsourcing, thereby forcing the Pentagon to operate more efficiently.

Second, Washington must do more to encourage the sale of defense equipment to our friends and allies abroad, like the littoral combat ship, the mine-resistant ambush-protected armored vehicle and a host of other combat and combat-support equipment. Manufacturing equipment for the American and foreign militaries simultaneously saves Washington money because more units are produced and overhead costs are shared, and it creates thousands of American jobs. The savings generated by international sales are too big to ignore, yet in too many cases the Pentagon has been only lukewarm in supporting such sales.

Third, the Pentagon should put a moratorium on starting any new procurement programs. Instead, it should use the money to increase the rate of production on existing ones and complete them faster and for less. All too often, the Defense Department fails to control its appetite, with too few dollars chasing too many programs. The result is the formation of “procurement death spirals,” during which the Pentagon buys fewer and fewer units at higher and higher prices.

Fourth, the new secretary of defense should adjust the military’s “tooth-to-tail ratio” — the ratio of fighters to support personnel — which is increasingly out of balance. During my time at the Pentagon, a large number of Army soldiers never deployed to a combat zone, whereas many of those who did were sent multiple times. Mr. Panetta should concentrate on cutting administrative workers — not the fighting force, intelligence personnel and front-line maintenance troops. Such cuts would greatly increase efficiency.

Finally, the Pentagon should give the heads of the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force and combatant commanders more say in decisions over buying equipment, including weapons. Right now, they identify their requirements at the beginning of the lengthy process for procuring equipment, but they do not have sufficient voice later on in the process — sometimes many years later — when there are opportunities to reduce costs. Too often, outdated specifications and contract language bind the government and the contractor to expensive purchases that have only marginal benefits. If service chiefs and combatant commanders were given the chance to modify unnecessarily complex or costly features, they could save time and money.

Mr. Panetta has served America admirably for decades, as a congressman, White House chief of staff and C.I.A. director, and he inherits the world’s finest military. But as he takes on his formidable new responsibility, I urge him to draw a lesson from the past. During the nearly five-year span between the end of World War II and America’s entrance into the Korean War in 1950, we let our armed forces deteriorate. As a result, America was woefully unprepared for the brutal fighting on the Korean Peninsula.

Budget decisions do have consequences, and making the right ones is crucial for our nation’s security.

Gordon R. England served during the administration of George W. Bush as secretary of the Navy and deputy secretary of defense.

It’s been a wasted year.

Just about everywhere in the Middle East there has been movement — stirring, remarkable, uneven — as the region breaks old chains of despotism and seeks its slice of the modern world. But Palestinians and Israelis remain stuck in their sterile and competitive narratives of victimhood, determined, it seems, to ensure past rancor defeats promise.

It’s been a year of terrible waste.

There is no alternative to resolving this most agonizing of conflicts but neither party ever quite gets to that realization. After 63 years the balance of power is overwhelmingly skewed in Israel’s favor and the one country that might redress that balance — the United States — is unwilling to because its politics allow no room for that. In general when power is so skewed between two parties peace is elusive.

Obama, when he returns to the U.N. in a few weeks, will face the consequences of a wasted year.

As usual, there’s plenty of blame to spread around. Obama had one of his worst moments last September when he brought the Israeli and Palestinian leaders to the White House to announce renewed talks, only for them to unravel as Israel refused to extend a moratorium on settlement expansion. Now, when the United States says to the Palestinians — “Trust us, come to the table, we can deliver” — they scoff.

It’s been a year of squandered opportunity.

The Palestinians, with ample cause for frustration at the sterile maneuvering of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have lost the sense of direction that had been growing for two years under the direction of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. They seem to have opted for an act of political theater that will get them nowhere and place them in confrontation with the United States.

Fayyad’s state building in the West Bank — schools and roads and institutions and security forces — led the World Bank to declare last year that the Palestinian Authority was ready for a state “at any point in the near future.” But Fayyad never got recognition from Israel for his achievements: Terrorist violence is down 96 percent in the West Bank in the past five years.

Israel snubbed a viable partner — criminal waste.

So the Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, became tempted by the notion of going to the U.N. in September to seek recognition for a Palestinian state. It’s not an idea Fayyad likes because he’s a pragmatist interested in results not symbolism. The results of this approach, if adopted, will be negative.

The U.S. will veto the Palestinian demand in the Security Council. It is possible major European allies will vote with the Palestinians and a 14-1 vote would be embarrassing for Israel. A vote in the General Assembly would go overwhelmingly in the Palestinians’ favor. But this would not get Palestine anywhere.

It would not gain membership in the United Nations. U.S. funding, to the tune of about $550 million a year, would be cut off because Congress would be incensed. The Israelis, angered, might also cut off tax revenues. The occupation would continue, along with its humiliations.

Abbas also decided to sign a reconciliation agreement with Hamas that was not thought through. It has since proved stillborn because Hamas will not accept Abbas’s insistence that Fayyad remain as prime minister. Instead, Abbas should have negotiated a truce pending elections in a year that would allow Palestinians to decide who should represent them. An empty reconciliation with Hamas only gave ammunition to Netanyahu, incensed Congress and embarrassed Fayyad.

The waste is so crushing that the Quartet, meeting this week in Washington, was unable even to agree on a statement. The Palestinians liked the mention of a peace “based on the 1967 lines” in Obama’s recent Middle East speech. Netanyahu loathed the speech but liked the mention of “Israel as a Jewish state and the homeland for the Jewish people.” Between the 1967 lines dear to the Palestinians and the Jewish state obsession of Netanyahu, finding a suitable form of words to encourage talks proved beyond the Quartet.

The Israeli insistence on up-front recognition from the Palestinians of Israel as a “Jewish state” is absurd — a powerful indication of growing Israeli insecurities, isolation and intolerance. There was no such insistence a decade ago.

States get recognized, not their nature, and the Palestine Liberation Organization has recognized Israel’s right to “exist in peace and security.” Palestinians are not going to elaborate on their recognition ahead of negotiations, while Netanyahu refuses to elaborate on what his vague formulation of “two states for two peoples” might actually mean.

The Jewish state issue is a cherry-on-the-cake issue for the last stage of any talks. So pushing it to the front of the agenda is just Netanyahu’s way of putting delaying tactics ahead of strategic thinking once again.

The waste is staggering and the looming train wreck appalling.

You can follow Roger Cohen on Twitter at twitter.com/nytimescohen
.

Fixes looks at solutions to social problems and why they work.

Shortly after Candace Keshwar immigrated from Trinidad to Boston in 2002, her life took a difficult turn. Her dream had been to go to college and have a career where she could help others. But her first daughter was born with cerebral palsy and Keshwar spent the next seven years caring for her at home. She grew isolated. Her husband worked in construction, but jobs were sporadic, and the family relied on government assistance. “It was a real dark space for me,” Keshwar said. “I kept thinking, ‘This cannot be my life. I know I have the potential to do so much more.’”

A turning point came when Keshwar was asked to join a group of families who had self-organized as part of an initiative that helps people in low-income communities achieve their goals. Called the Family Independence Initiative (FII), its approach is radically different from the American social service model. Although it is still quite small — working with a few hundred families — its results are so striking that the White House has taken notice. What FII does is create a structure for families that encourages the sense of control, desire for self-determination, and mutual support that have characterized the collective rise out of poverty for countless communities in American history.

FII is not a “program” in a traditional sense. It doesn’t seek to implement changes, but to elicit them from others. It was launched as a research project by Maurice Lim Miller in Oakland in 2001. Lim Miller, whose mother was an immigrant from Mexico who worked multiple jobs to support her children, had previously spent 22 years building Asian Neighborhood Design, a youth development and job training program, for which he was honored by President Clinton during the 1999 State of the Union address.

Lim Miller had come to believe that the American social welfare system focused too much on poor people’s needs and deficits, while overlooking — and even inhibiting — their strengths. A safety net is crucial when people are in crisis, he said. But most poor families are not in free fall. They don’t need nets to catch them so much as they need springboards to jump higher. In a conversation with Oakland’s mayor Jerry Brown (now California’s governor), Brown challenged Lim Miller to try something different and gave him broad scope to be creative.

Courtesy of Family Independence InitiativeA Family Independence Initiative gathering in Boston.

Lim Miller wanted to see what families would do if they came together in a context that supported their initiative. He began by identifying families in low-income communities who were surviving, but who had “given up hope” of aspiring to more. He asked them to pull together six to eight other families. He offered them a challenge. The country had been waging a war on poverty for 40 years, he said, but the problem remained unsolved. “What we’re going to do is give you some resources and connections and we’re going to trust that you’ll do something,” he said. “You guys are in the power position. If you do nothing we’ll fail. If you do something we’ll all learn.”

They started with 25 families in three cohorts — eight African American families, six Salvadoran refugee families and 11 Iu Mien families from Laos. The latter were all on welfare. FII asked them to write down their goals, gave each a computer and enlisted them to fill in a questionnaire each month that tracked changes in things like income, assets, debts, health, education, skills, social networks and civic engagement.

They offered families $30 for every success they reported up to a maximum of $200 per month. (FII pays for reporting, not for specific actions, a different anti-poverty approach known as “conditional cash transfers” that we have reported on in Fixes.) Lim Miller reasoned that if he were to hire a consultant to collect this data, it would cost three or four times more. The families agreed to meet with an FII liaison every three months for an audit. Anything they reported — a pay increase, a doctor visit, an improvement in a child’s grades — had to be documented.

Most important, families had to agree to meet as a group at least once a month in a confidential setting to discuss their goals and any issues they deemed important. FII didn’t guide the agenda and its liaisons did not act as facilitators. They established the structure and backed off, creating a vacuum for families to take the lead. Lim Miller gave his staff strict instructions that they could not offer any advice — not even friendly suggestions. For some, this proved too difficult; he had to fire people who couldn’t help but be helpful. Lim Miller was convinced that the assumption of incapacity behind the helpfulness was a big part of the problem.

“When you come into a community that is vulnerable with professionals with power and preset ideas, it is overpowering to families and it can hold them back,” he said. “Nobody wants to hear that because we’re all the good guys. But the focus on need undermines our ability to see their strengths — and their ability to see their own strengths.”

At first, families waited for direction from FII. Some grew frustrated. But soon people began sharing their goals, publicly declaring things like: “I need to get out of debt.” “I need to spend more time with my kids.” “I need to stop smoking.” “I need to get my G.E.D.” Group members offered encouragement, as well as advice and contacts. In follow up meetings, people would talk about steps they had taken. The group members would hold one another to account: “Didn’t you say you were going to get your G.E.D.? Where are you with that?”

One Salvadoran couple, Jorge and Maria Elena, decided to borrow money from friends and take out a mortgage to purchase a home. It was a predatory loan — and when it became clear that they were in danger of losing the home, friends helped them renovate it and fix up the yard so they could refinance at better terms. Today, the couple are still in the home. Shortly after, other group members — who had historically sent extra money to El Salvador — began saving here, believing that home ownership might be a possibility for them in America. “That’s when we saw how strong the ripple effect was,” recalled Lim Miller.

Of the initial 25 families, FII found that, after two years, household incomes had increased 27 percent (excluding the payments offered by FII). People got promotions, pay raises, worked extra hours, and built up informal side businesses. After FII’s payments stopped, incomes continued to increase. After another year, they were 40 percent higher than the baseline. “Nobody believed it,” Lim Miller recalled. “The stereotype is that they can’t do it. People said, ‘You have to be creaming [picking the easiest people to help].’ They can’t believe that this capacity exists and that it can be brought forth.”

He extended the work to Hawaii and San Francisco. After two years, FII reported that incomes across all its sites had increased, on average, by 23 percent and savings were up 240 percent. In San Francisco, 30 percent of families established side businesses — everything from lawn maintenance to making pupusas to cutting people’s hair — to cope with the recession. A quarter of the families that had been receiving government income or housing subsidies — CalWorks or Section 8 — dropped them. Families reported improvements in health care, children’s grades, reductions in debt, enrollment in training programs and home ownership — all audited. Word rippled outward and within six months, 200 families applied to join FII. “Something viral had happened,” explained Mia Birdsong, FII’s vice president. “We still trying to track how it spread. We think it has to do with the trust factor.”

Last year, FII started working in Boston. Within six months, family incomes were up by 13 percent. At her first meeting, Candace Keshwar saw new possibilities for her life. “There were a bunch of people who had stories that were very similar to mine in terms of the struggles,” she said. “But I saw that people were still managing some accomplishments. One girl went to college with her babies. The stories made me realize that I could go after some of the things that I wanted.”

Keshwar’s goals were to get a job, buy a car that could accommodate her daughter’s wheelchair, enroll in college and buy a home. She found that tracking her progress was helpful in this process. “When you actually see on paper what you’ve done, it allows you to think further,” she said. The networking was also critical. One of her group members helped her re-write her resume. Another arranged an appointment with a friend who offered credit counseling. “It’s much better than having to call an office and get the runaround,” she said.

Today, Keshwar works as a family partner at Boston Health Care for the Homeless, owns a 2007 Pathfinder, has enrolled in Springfield College and is building a credit history. She is working toward a degree in human services with a concentration in mental health counseling and also plans to pursue a nursing degree. She has also encouraged her husband to get his contractor’s license.

Related

More From Fixes

Read previous contributions to this series.

Lim Miller is clear that FII is not trying to lend comfort to people who want to dismantle the social service system. He wants to fix it: to make it more about incentives. Today, 85 percent of the $400 billion that the government spends to encourage things like home ownership, college attendance, investment and small business ends up in the pockets of the top 20 percent of earners (and half goes to the top 5 percent). Very little ends up helping the working poor. On the other hand, many social benefits cut off when a family’s income rises roughly 30 percent above the poverty line — which is still a far cry from being out of poverty.

For the middle class, resources are linked to initiative; for the poor, they are linked to problems. “We’re not advocating for this gravity defying ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps idea,’” adds Birdsong. “We’re saying: invest in families when they take initiative. We need to take what works for middle and upper income families and extend it to the whole income spectrum.”

FII’s budget is only $2.5 million. It is still to be seen if its approach will work with much larger numbers of families. But its experience with a few hundred reveals ways that social services could work better. Lim Miller offers three suggestions as a starter: 1) Where possible, replace case managers with peer families who have succeeded; 2) Make it easier for small scale entrepreneurs to start businesses and raise capital; 3) Solicit regular feedback from the clients. “These families have opinions about what works and what doesn’t work,” he explains. “Our system would work better if it responded to their feedback. And it would be very empowering to them if they knew their voices were heard.”

On Wednesday, I’ll respond to comments, explain how FII’s work draws on the idea of “positive deviance,” and explain how the organization plans to expand its reach by tapping the leadership that has emerged within the families in its network.

Join Fixes on Facebook and follow updates on twitter.com/nytimesfixes.

David Bornstein is the author of “How to Change the World,” which has been published in 20 languages, and “The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen Bank,” and is co-author of “Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know.” He is the founder of dowser.org, a media site that reports on social innovation.

Fixes looks at solutions to social problems and why they work.

Shortly after Candace Keshwar immigrated from Trinidad to Boston in 2002, her life took a difficult turn. Her dream had been to go to college and have a career where she could help others. But her first daughter was born with cerebral palsy and Keshwar spent the next seven years caring for her at home. She grew isolated. Her husband worked in construction, but jobs were sporadic, and the family relied on government assistance. “It was a real dark space for me,” Keshwar said. “I kept thinking, ‘This cannot be my life. I know I have the potential to do so much more.’”

A turning point came when Keshwar was asked to join a group of families who had self-organized as part of an initiative that helps people in low-income communities achieve their goals. Called the Family Independence Initiative (FII), its approach is radically different from the American social service model. Although it is still quite small — working with a few hundred families — its results are so striking that the White House has taken notice. What FII does is create a structure for families that encourages the sense of control, desire for self-determination, and mutual support that have characterized the collective rise out of poverty for countless communities in American history.

FII is not a “program” in a traditional sense. It doesn’t seek to implement changes, but to elicit them from others. It was launched as a research project by Maurice Lim Miller in Oakland in 2001. Lim Miller, whose mother was an immigrant from Mexico who worked multiple jobs to support her children, had previously spent 22 years building Asian Neighborhood Design, a youth development and job training program, for which he was honored by President Clinton during the 1999 State of the Union address.

Lim Miller had come to believe that the American social welfare system focused too much on poor people’s needs and deficits, while overlooking — and even inhibiting — their strengths. A safety net is crucial when people are in crisis, he said. But most poor families are not in free fall. They don’t need nets to catch them so much as they need springboards to jump higher. In a conversation with Oakland’s mayor Jerry Brown (now California’s governor), Brown challenged Lim Miller to try something different and gave him broad scope to be creative.

Courtesy of Family Independence InitiativeA Family Independence Initiative gathering in Boston.

Lim Miller wanted to see what families would do if they came together in a context that supported their initiative. He began by identifying families in low-income communities who were surviving, but who had “given up hope” of aspiring to more. He asked them to pull together six to eight other families. He offered them a challenge. The country had been waging a war on poverty for 40 years, he said, but the problem remained unsolved. “What we’re going to do is give you some resources and connections and we’re going to trust that you’ll do something,” he said. “You guys are in the power position. If you do nothing we’ll fail. If you do something we’ll all learn.”

They started with 25 families in three cohorts — eight African American families, six Salvadoran refugee families and 11 Iu Mien families from Laos. The latter were all on welfare. FII asked them to write down their goals, gave each a computer and enlisted them to fill in a questionnaire each month that tracked changes in things like income, assets, debts, health, education, skills, social networks and civic engagement.

They offered families $30 for every success they reported up to a maximum of $200 per month. (FII pays for reporting, not for specific actions, a different anti-poverty approach known as “conditional cash transfers” that we have reported on in Fixes.) Lim Miller reasoned that if he were to hire a consultant to collect this data, it would cost three or four times more. The families agreed to meet with an FII liaison every three months for an audit. Anything they reported — a pay increase, a doctor visit, an improvement in a child’s grades — had to be documented.

Most important, families had to agree to meet as a group at least once a month in a confidential setting to discuss their goals and any issues they deemed important. FII didn’t guide the agenda and its liaisons did not act as facilitators. They established the structure and backed off, creating a vacuum for families to take the lead. Lim Miller gave his staff strict instructions that they could not offer any advice — not even friendly suggestions. For some, this proved too difficult; he had to fire people who couldn’t help but be helpful. Lim Miller was convinced that the assumption of incapacity behind the helpfulness was a big part of the problem.

“When you come into a community that is vulnerable with professionals with power and preset ideas, it is overpowering to families and it can hold them back,” he said. “Nobody wants to hear that because we’re all the good guys. But the focus on need undermines our ability to see their strengths — and their ability to see their own strengths.”

At first, families waited for direction from FII. Some grew frustrated. But soon people began sharing their goals, publicly declaring things like: “I need to get out of debt.” “I need to spend more time with my kids.” “I need to stop smoking.” “I need to get my G.E.D.” Group members offered encouragement, as well as advice and contacts. In follow up meetings, people would talk about steps they had taken. The group members would hold one another to account: “Didn’t you say you were going to get your G.E.D.? Where are you with that?”

One Salvadoran couple, Jorge and Maria Elena, decided to borrow money from friends and take out a mortgage to purchase a home. It was a predatory loan — and when it became clear that they were in danger of losing the home, friends helped them renovate it and fix up the yard so they could refinance at better terms. Today, the couple are still in the home. Shortly after, other group members — who had historically sent extra money to El Salvador — began saving here, believing that home ownership might be a possibility for them in America. “That’s when we saw how strong the ripple effect was,” recalled Lim Miller.

Of the initial 25 families, FII found that, after two years, household incomes had increased 27 percent (excluding the payments offered by FII). People got promotions, pay raises, worked extra hours, and built up informal side businesses. After FII’s payments stopped, incomes continued to increase. After another year, they were 40 percent higher than the baseline. “Nobody believed it,” Lim Miller recalled. “The stereotype is that they can’t do it. People said, ‘You have to be creaming [picking the easiest people to help].’ They can’t believe that this capacity exists and that it can be brought forth.”

He extended the work to Hawaii and San Francisco. After two years, FII reported that incomes across all its sites had increased, on average, by 23 percent and savings were up 240 percent. In San Francisco, 30 percent of families established side businesses — everything from lawn maintenance to making pupusas to cutting people’s hair — to cope with the recession. A quarter of the families that had been receiving government income or housing subsidies — CalWorks or Section 8 — dropped them. Families reported improvements in health care, children’s grades, reductions in debt, enrollment in training programs and home ownership — all audited. Word rippled outward and within six months, 200 families applied to join FII. “Something viral had happened,” explained Mia Birdsong, FII’s vice president. “We still trying to track how it spread. We think it has to do with the trust factor.”

Last year, FII started working in Boston. Within six months, family incomes were up by 13 percent. At her first meeting, Candace Keshwar saw new possibilities for her life. “There were a bunch of people who had stories that were very similar to mine in terms of the struggles,” she said. “But I saw that people were still managing some accomplishments. One girl went to college with her babies. The stories made me realize that I could go after some of the things that I wanted.”

Keshwar’s goals were to get a job, buy a car that could accommodate her daughter’s wheelchair, enroll in college and buy a home. She found that tracking her progress was helpful in this process. “When you actually see on paper what you’ve done, it allows you to think further,” she said. The networking was also critical. One of her group members helped her re-write her resume. Another arranged an appointment with a friend who offered credit counseling. “It’s much better than having to call an office and get the runaround,” she said.

Today, Keshwar works as a family partner at Boston Health Care for the Homeless, owns a 2007 Pathfinder, has enrolled in Springfield College and is building a credit history. She is working toward a degree in human services with a concentration in mental health counseling and also plans to pursue a nursing degree. She has also encouraged her husband to get his contractor’s license.

Related

More From Fixes

Read previous contributions to this series.

Lim Miller is clear that FII is not trying to lend comfort to people who want to dismantle the social service system. He wants to fix it: to make it more about incentives. Today, 85 percent of the $400 billion that the government spends to encourage things like home ownership, college attendance, investment and small business ends up in the pockets of the top 20 percent of earners (and half goes to the top 5 percent). Very little ends up helping the working poor. On the other hand, many social benefits cut off when a family’s income rises roughly 30 percent above the poverty line — which is still a far cry from being out of poverty.

For the middle class, resources are linked to initiative; for the poor, they are linked to problems. “We’re not advocating for this gravity defying ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps idea,’” adds Birdsong. “We’re saying: invest in families when they take initiative. We need to take what works for middle and upper income families and extend it to the whole income spectrum.”

FII’s budget is only $2.5 million. It is still to be seen if its approach will work with much larger numbers of families. But its experience with a few hundred reveals ways that social services could work better. Lim Miller offers three suggestions as a starter: 1) Where possible, replace case managers with peer families who have succeeded; 2) Make it easier for small scale entrepreneurs to start businesses and raise capital; 3) Solicit regular feedback from the clients. “These families have opinions about what works and what doesn’t work,” he explains. “Our system would work better if it responded to their feedback. And it would be very empowering to them if they knew their voices were heard.”

On Wednesday, I’ll respond to comments, explain how FII’s work draws on the idea of “positive deviance,” and explain how the organization plans to expand its reach by tapping the leadership that has emerged within the families in its network.

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David Bornstein is the author of “How to Change the World,” which has been published in 20 languages, and “The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen Bank,” and is co-author of “Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know.” He is the founder of dowser.org, a media site that reports on social innovation.

Introduction

Pascal Parrot/Getty Images A classroom in Kanazi, Niger.

As women become more educated, they gain power and that leads them to have fewer children. This has been the accepted thinking for decades, and has been cited in campaigns to promote education for girls in countries with high population rates. A lower birth rate aids economic growth.

But in a recent study conducted in Norway, Joel Cohen, head of the Laboratory of Populations at Rockefeller University, and his co-authors from the University of Oslo, Øystein Kravdalb and Nico Keilmanb, found that childbearing kept Norwegian women from pursuing a higher education more than education impeded childbearing.

Does such research challenge the conventional wisdom or are the results simply different from country to country, depending on a country’s level of development? How do we refine the age-old question: Does education reduce childbearing, or does childbearing get in the way of education?

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