The Giving Review: Beyond charity to authentic empowerment

This article by Julia Nelson first appeared in the Giving Review.

My late boss, mentor, and friend Bob Woodson (1937-2026) is rightly remembered as a principled activist who rallied people from all walks of life to make tangible things happen. From his early years in the Civil Rights Movement to his long decades working in distressed neighborhoods, he was indeed a great leader of men. But that is not all he was.

Ideas were Bob’s side hustle, not his main gig, but his ideas reflected reality more completely and had farther-reaching implications than those of many career thinkers, particularly in the poverty/upward-mobility space. His wisdom transcended “how to do charity” and instead challenged the fundamental assumptions about the poor of private philanthropists and government bureaucrats alike. And in doing so, he unlocked the latent genius of overlooked people all over the country.

Bob would never say that he invented grassroots-led neighborhood solutions any more than John Locke invented the social contract or Adam Smith invented capitalism. But he saw, understood, and described emergent, indigenously led transformation with unmatched profundity and accuracy. He was Alexis de Tocqueville, concretely reimagined and applied to modern life. That he was also inspirational, magnetic, and constantly in the middle of the action himself often distracted from what will hopefully—in retrospect at least—be understood as his essential contributions to our understanding of how to effectively address a wide range of persistent social problems.

Genuine respect for and deference to neighborhood leadership

As surely as he knew the sun would rise each morning, Bob believed that all communities contained within themselves the seeds of their own renewal. This unshakable conviction led him to successfully seek out and support capable leaders living in communities in need of renewal all over the country. Famously (around the Woodson Center offices, anyway), where a well-funded two-year investigation found no effective neighborhood leaders in a particular city, Bob identified 30 in a single weekend.

It is hard to overstate the degree to which Bob worked to support and reinforce the vision of those indigenous leaders and was careful to never override them or impose his own vision on theirs. He did not go into a community uninvited, and he never brought an agenda beyond helping them achieve their own goals. He understood that privately funded outsiders were vulnerable to the same blind spots as government central planners, and that the most-important parts of community life are often invisible to people who don’t live there, including to himself. Even with all his years of experience, he waited to earn people’s trust; he never demanded it.

Bob didn’t consider it magnanimity to recognize the value of local knowledge and the completely untapped potential of indigenous leaders in struggling communities. To him, it was both common sense and an honor to learn at their feet. He treated them like his heroes, not his acolytes, and staff meetings were filled with his accounts of the lessons he had learned from them. Of course, he was a hero to them as well, and it was never lost on them that he used his resources and influence not to elevate his own profile, but to support and expand their work.

Over the years, skeptics of Bob’s approach have offered various rationales for why his practice of submitting to neighborhood leadership would not work in the communities they serve. Some claim that his principles don’t apply to rural poverty (tell that to the folks in Lowndes County, Alabama, where Bob and the Center supported local leaders to effectively address a myriad of supposedly intractable problems), while others claim homeless populations don’t produce their own leaders capable of catalyzing change. (Again, meet Pastor Maurice Lattimore, just one of countless grassroots leaders whose experience with homelessness informs his ministry to people living on the street.) And of course, many dismiss effective grassroots work as the one-off, unreproducible results of uniquely “charismatic” leaders, an objection addressed at some length here.

Ultimately, as Bob pointed out many times, the social trust and moral authority of these local leaders are the scarcest resources in upward-mobility work. It is both more efficient and ethical to support the people who already possess them, rather than try to subordinate such folks to an outsider-led effort. Unfortunately, if you don’t possess these resources, it is very tempting to assume no one else does either.

Individual agency without atomization

Bob’s “no-excuses” view of achievement was naturally compatible with the right-of-center ideological emphasis on personal responsibility. But his work and view of the world rejected the hyper-individualism that can currently be found on both the right and the left, without falling captive to romanticized notions of what the state is capable of doing. It was obvious to him that—in his own life and in the lives of those he served—our choices and our character are influenced by the company we keep.

Bob didn’t speak of his own grit and determination without referencing the family and friends who shaped him into who he was, in the midst of segregation and poverty. Where others saw only gloom and doom in difficulties like single parenthood, Bob saw countless on-ramps to the “Success Sequence,” even for those who missed the first couple of steps. Thus, it wasn’t surprising to him that the most-effective groups the Woodson Center supported over the years didn’t just deliver goods, services, instruction, or therapy; they created an infinite variety of moral communities that bonded their members together, filling in where families, schools, or other institutions had dropped the ball or needed help.

In his recent book Marked by Time: How Social Change Has Transformed Crime and the Life Trajectories of Young Americans, sociologist Robert J. Sampson laments, “We typically view character as an immutable core of personality traits, guiding our actions and defining who we are, with a distinctly moral dimension that leads us to think about—or at least talk about—individuals a simply good or bad.” Bob believed in the overwhelming importance of character, but he did not treat it like a static attribute. He had seen too many “hopeless cases” experience complete transformation to believe that anyone was beyond redemption. And it was his devotion to what he often termed “radical grace” that was a key ingredient in his staunch patriotism, for which he was so beloved by many conservatives.

Just as he didn’t believe America should be defined by her vilest sins, he didn’t believe any individual should be defined by his worst decisions. This didn’t mean he was soft on crime; far from it. It meant he abided no exceptions to the rule of treating every person with respect, and he had the utmost admiration for people who chose to forgive those who had wronged them. Sometimes that forgiveness could transform even the most-hardened criminal heart; always it liberated the forgiver.

The Pharaoh-Joseph framework

Bob’s Pharaoh-Joseph framework—taken from Genesis and detailed in his book The Triumphs of Joseph: How Todays Community Healers Are Reviving Our Streets and Neighborhoods—was a revolutionary understanding of the most-effective way for philanthropists to use their wealth and power for good. In this story, a virtually all-powerful Pharaoh recognizes his own limited ability to understand and address the challenges his nation is facing. He looks for an effective problem-solver, not someone to tell him how great he is, or co-sign his pet doctrines.

Joseph presents a plan, and Pharaoh gives Joseph the resources and authority to carry out that plan according to his own good judgement. Funders who are more interested in tangible solutions than in vanity projects or emotional validation will partner well with the community leaders Bob respected so much, and he devoted much of his time and energy to helping as many as he could to do just that.

Throughout Bob’s long life, he was offered much-easier and far more financially lucrative opportunities. But he always treated his work on behalf of the poor as a privilege, not an entitlement or “charity.” And he instilled the same attitude in his staff and countless disciples, never expressing anything but gratitude to serve those facing problems that terrified most people.

As philanthropists continue to grapple with issues like impact measurement, sustainability, and other questions about best practices, I hope they will make use of all Bob accomplished and wrote. His legacy is more than a string of inspiring success stories, or illustrative footnotes for smaller ideas. Understood in its totality, his work challenges all of us not just to ask different questions about poverty, but to reevaluate the very premises of the questions themselves.