I was munching a corn muffin and sipping black coffee at Third & Eats, a non-profit delicatessen run by a church, where homeless people learn to cook and serve and work their way off the streets, when I saw the T-shirt tacked to the ceiling. The shirt (it looked like an extra-large, Beefy-T) uttered its message in green and white, restating the old wisdom in politically correct first person: "Give me a fish and I'll eat for a day ... teach me to fish and I'll eat for a lifetime."

Later, I heard it quoted at a food bank in Ohio, in the original form: "Give a man a fish." I saw it in fund-raising material for a job-training program for Spanish-speaking computer trainees in Boston; and I heard it again from Red Gates, a Lakota Sioux activist in North Dakota, who presides over a galvanized-iron warehouse filled with surplus government commodities, canned fat pork and butter and beans, where he worries about feeding the people and ending the grinding poverty that keeps them down.

"Teach a man to fish." It seemed as good a way as any to sum up in a few words the story I wanted to tell.

But it wasn't as simple as I thought. I figured this out one sunny afternoon in Alaska, when the short Arctic summer was hurtling toward autumn and I found myself standing on duckboards on a muddy vacant lot in Anchorage, talking to a guy who looks like a young Abraham Lincoln and who gives people fish.

Right there while I was watching, he reached his bare arms into a big white plastic bin full of ice and fish, hauled out an 18-inch-long silver-scaled beauty and whap! He threw it into the back of a hungry college student's station wagon, where it joined a growing pile leaking blood and fish guts all over her spare tire. She smiled and thanked him and threw it into gear and drove off, apparently quite more than happy to be fed for a day. That was when I figured out the truth behind the old rule: Cliches are sometimes right, but you can never trust 'em. Just when you think you've got the conventional wisdom figured out, it'll turn around and bite you.

I had found my way to something like 45 states at that point, still hoping that sooner or later I'd run into someone who'd found the secret everyone else had overlooked. I'd ask questions, joking that I was using the tools of journalism for a benign purpose. I worked sources and culled clippings and followed word-of-mouth reports to trace the bright, creative and committed people who were working out of church basements and storefront food pantries and burned-out industrial buildings and, here and there, actually making a difference in the lives of poor, hungry and homeless people. If I could find enough of them, and study their ideas until they fell into some kind of larger pattern, I reasoned, perhaps the lessons they'd have to teach would come so clear and pure and demonstrably sensible that everyone would want to try them.

Giving Away Fish

That's the way Michael O'Callaghan sees it. He's the Lincoln lookalike in Anchorage -- a lean, muttonchopped man with a mission -- who calls himself "a rowdy" and says every salmon he hands out to a hungry Alaskan carries a message: "Here in Alaska, we have a tremendous abundance of fish, but the people don't have access," he said. "These people here can't go out and get fish. Licenses, regulations -- it's bullshit! The people should be able to get their fish. So the deal is, this is a common property resource, it belongs to the people. Rich, poor, they belong to everybody."

This is no sweet, turn-the-other-cheek philosophy but a hell-raising, do-what's-right approach that has led O'Callaghan to salvage and give away 800,000 pounds of fish that would otherwise have been left to rot and, remarkably, prompted the Alaska State Legislature to cough up $30,000 to help him do it.

And so when the word goes out that Mike's got fish to give away, hungry people come from all over Anchorage and out in the bush country, converging in station wagons, vans, rusty sedans and pickup trucks on the muddy vacant lot at Fifth Avenue and Barrow Street, just down the block from the city's pride, the sparkling new Alaska Center for the Arts, a $60-million edifice where Alaskans who can afford it spend $50 and more to see concerts and plays. Promptly at noon, a rumbling semi-trailer pulls in, bearing waist-high white plastic bins filled with fat, glistening pink salmon carcasses in salt water on ice. They're free for the taking for anyone who wants them -- just bring your own bag -- and they're good food, food that was being thrown away by the ton until Michael O'Callaghan got into the act.

O'Callaghan confesses that he started doing this kind of thing for a simple reason that had little to do with charity or sending the government a message. He was unemployed, and he and his family were hungry. This condition led him first to "dumpster diving" and has evolved into EARTH, a non-profit, zero-budget organization of volunteers that he heads. He doesn't spend much time keeping count, but EARTH has surely fed thousands of Alaskans. The whole thing started when the Carr's grocery store near his home fenced off a dumpster that previously had been a reliable source of stale baked goods, discarded dented cans and other edible but unsalable items. O'Callaghan suggested that the store manager remove the fence so the people could eat, and received an unsurprising refusal. So, he said, "I put on a suit and came back as 'The Rev. O'Callaghan,' and I went to a bigger guy." The grocery executive agreed to let O'Callaghan's group, with permission, take usable produce and canned goods from one department of one store to distribute to poor people.

This limited effort worked so well that Carr's -- with O'Callaghan's nudging -- soon extended its permission to the full store, and then to its entire Anchorage-area chain. Now EARTH coordinates more than 100 volunteers who report regularly to Carr's outlets, pick up discarded cans and other usable food, and dispense it all to hungry people through their own churches and civic groups. No muss, no fuss, no red tape, no paperwork. Last year, O'Callaghan estimates, the group passed along 800,000 pounds of food, food that previously went to the dumpster.

The fish giveaway started in much the same way. Three years ago, an Alaska hatchery spawned controversy when it was revealed that, because of the market economy, it intended to dump an entire year's migration of pink salmon, an edible but commercially undesirable species known as "humpies." Appalled by this waste, O'Callaghan scouted up a fish boat and a crew to run it, headed for the salmon grounds, got out in front of the hatchery's boats and captured 20,000 pounds of fresh salmon, which they brought back to Anchorage and gave away in 24 hours.

The following year learning that hatcheries routinely discard tons of edible but commercially undesirable pink salmon after stripping the females of their eggs and the males of milt for breeding O'Callaghan's group won the permission of several hatcheries to take the carcasses for free. They persuaded the state legislature to allocate $30,000 to cover truck rental, and EARTH started trucking salmon to downtown Anchorage. During the August and September season, they gave away 585,000 pounds of salmon. The following year, armed with a $75,000 grant, the group gave away more than 800,000 pounds ... at a rate of more than 40,000 pounds a day during the peak of the season.

"You know anybody with a pickup?" O'Callaghan asked the woman from the University of Alaska, who said her station-wagon load of salmon, stored in the freezer, would feed her all winter. "If they've got a pickup, they can take a truckload back to the university and give it away."

O'Callaghan sees beyond the joy of helping people to the policy implications of what he's doing. He would like to see the Alaska fishery project replicated in every region where commercial fishing is practiced, and he's lobbying to have the Department of Commerce's National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration (NOAA) add a tax on commercial fisheries to finance it. It's a mighty big dream; but as he says, fist pounding the air to punctuate the point, throwing away millions of pounds of fish every year is a mighty big waste. A big enough waste, indeed, to justify giving fish to quite a few people. Time enough to teach them to fish later.

Change vs. Charity

EARTH is unusual, but it's hardly unique. It's part of a quiet revolution that's been going on all over America, effectively but without much notice, during the past dozen years.

There's nothing new about charity. Humans have dispensed it more or less freely to those less fortunate since biblical times. But what's going on here is a little different from charity, and a little more than charity. Concern for the poor has traditionally been a function of churches and, sometimes, the government. But EARTH is neither. It is an unusual partnership involving individuals in a non-profit situation, state government, and private enterprise.

This concept of partnerships between government and the non-profit sector -- a slight twist on the notion of privatization that is inspiring government during the 1990s to seek entrepreneurial solutions to problems by contracting with the private sector -- will recur again and again throughout this book. It is one of the major keys to supporting the most effective grassroots initiatives in the fight against poverty.

Here's another of the secrets of the quiet revolution that started suddenly and with little notice, all over the nation during the 1980s: It was an instinctive. pragmatic reaction by everyday people to a sudden increase in visible hunger and poverty. Pragmatism and a common-sense, roll-up-your-sleeves approach to local problems has been a part of the American culture -- and one of which we're justly proud -- for centuries. It still is. It had little to do with government and nothing to do with social policy, but it quickly spread from the nation's largest cities to smaller cities, suburbs and farm towns.

Many elements spurred this change. It can't be pinned entirely on either Republicans or Democrats. Tax-weary citizens shouted through referendums like California's Proposition 13 to limit taxation and many of the government programs that taxes pay for. Well-meaning reformers opened the doors of state mental institutions, which they accurately described as warehouses; but local governments declined to finance halfway houses and support programs to move newly released mental patients back into community life. Inflation in the wake of the Arab Oil Embargo hit the economy hard, and the Reagan Administration brought a minimalist view of government to bear during the 1980s, cutting deeply into federal social-service spending, particularly low-cost housing. The result? More homelessness.

While the richest 5 percent of Americans saw large increases in their incomes during the Reagan Era, most working people saw no real increase in their inflation-adjusted income after 1979. Before long, the growing class of working poor -- people who earn at or near the minimum wage -- could no longer maintain their families at the poverty level even by working full time. As Harvard public-policy Prof. David Ellwood, who later took a post overseeing welfare reform in the Clinton administration, was fond of saying, "People who work shouldn't have to be poor." This simple truism strikes a chord in the American spirit, and yet most of us learned to look the other way and ignore this reality, much as we learned to look the other way as beggars and homeless people proliferated on the streets of our cities. In fact, nearly 27 million Americans were receiving food stamps in 1994, and fully 40 percent of the adults below the poverty line had jobs.

Meanwhile, manufacturing jobs fled overseas, and toward the end of his term, even President George Bush acknowledged that the economy was in "free fall." The problem transcends party politics, of course. Things didn't look up for poor people in America when Bill Clinton moved into the White House. A full year into the Clinton administration, a poll by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion found that an estimated 2.5 million New Yorkers said they had to sacrifice clothing, medical care, living arrangements or food to make ends meet. "The hardship extended above the poverty line and beyond the working poor to include middle-income families,'' poll director Barbara Carvalho said.

The survey found that more than one-third of New Yorkers with family incomes under $25,000 couldn't afford to buy clothes that they needed. More than one-fourth reported passing on necessary visits to the doctor, and one in seven said they sometimes had to do without food.

Even one in six New Yorkers with family incomes between $25,000 and $60,999 said they had to sacrifice clothing and medical care, according to the poll. (The median family income in the city is $34,000.)

So familiar has the sight of homeless street people and soup kitchens become in our cities that we forget these everyday realities were uncommon after the Great Depression and through most of the postwar years. Until the 1980s, Americans assumed that it was customary for people to live and sleep on the street in places like Calcutta, but certainly not New York City or Wichita, Kan. We knew our grandparents had stood on soup lines during the Great Depression. But it couldn't happen now ... or so we thought.

So when poor people started turning up at rectory doors begging for food and cash during the 1981 recession, the initial response came from the traditional sources: religious and charitable organizations, which began passing out meals and finding room to set up cots in church basements, offering charity to help people get through the hard times. But something different happened, something that had never happened during any previous postwar recession: The hard times didn't end, and the same people kept coming back for more. It wasn't long before the ad hoc lunches grew into soup kitchens and the rooms of cots evolved into congregate shelters. Emulating a model that spread by word of mouth, most larger cities opened food "banks," non-profit organizations that coordinated donations of food and cash and distributed foodstuffs to non-profit soup kitchens and food "pantries" in an organized, businesslike way.

And then, mirroring a development that had been tried with mixed success during the Great Society of the '60s -- when non-profit organizations formed partnerships with government to provide better services together than either could do independently -- these grass-roots initiatives started to change. Instead of merely providing emergency services, many of them evolved into multiple-purpose organizations that didn't just feed hungry and homeless people, but sought to identify their problems and do whatever was needed to move them back into the mainstream.

These initiatives did not trickle down from the federal government, or from foundations, or think tanks or academe. They rose up from the grass roots. They developed out of the common-sense ideas of foot soldiers in the war on poverty, using good, old-fashioned American know-how, creativity and can-do spirit.

President Bush praised these efforts as "Points of Light." But in doing so, he also perpetuated a myth: That private groups and individual charity could replace government in ensuring that no American would go unhoused, unclothed and unfed. Bipartisan recognition of government's duty to provide basic support for every American, started in the New Deal and refined in the Great Society, had made significant progress toward erasing domestic hunger and poverty by the '70s. But it unraveled during the next decade, which saw Wall Streeters build fortunes while literally stepping over an increasing throng of homeless people sleeping under cardboard on the Financial District's side streets.

Now, creative partnerships between government and non-profit organizations -- with government providing financing and appropriate oversight to grassroots organizations that provide competent, caring services at the local level -- may offer a roadmap back to a healthy American society. It is time for government to pay attention to the outstanding ideas coming from the grass-roots geniuses who know best how to fight the war on poverty in their own cities and towns. It is time for government to re-evaluate its social-service programs and to separate effective initatives from those that are obsolete or that never worked well; looking away from tradition and toward the new ideas that have been tested and proven in the nation's neighborhoods. It is time for government to call a truce in the turf wars that are inevitable when poverty programs are dispersed among such disparate cabinets as Agriculture, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Labor and even Defense and the Interior. It's time for the grass roots and government to come together to create new, more effective forms of social services, and to eliminate the worst of poverty in the United States once and for all.

There are hundreds of effective models all over America. If any community elected to replicate them all, that community could put hunger and poverty on the run. As necessary as soup kitchens and shelters are while thousands of Americans remain without adequate housing or sufficient food, they do little to attack the deeper problems that cause hunger and poverty. The best of these new models go beyond mere handouts. They don't provide mere charity but foster social change. They build self-reliance.

At Esperanza Unida, on Milwaukee's predominantly Hispanic South Side, young men like Gilbert Sanchez learn how to repair cars by working alongside experienced mentors in a non-profit venture that operates a commercial auto shop as a thriving business. Sanchez had stitched together a resume featuring long gaps of unemployment with short-term jobs at minimum wage. He worked for a while as an errand boy in a print shop for just over $4 an hour. Now he has a skilled job at a Milwaukee Oldsmobile dealer, where he earns $17 an hour and has his eyes on the management track. Esperanza Unida found its approach so successful that it has added hands-on training in many marketable skills, from auto-body repair to welding, building trades, family day care. Esperanza Unida doesn't give people food. It gives people the tools to earn a good living. That's self-reliance.

In rural Alabama, where isolated Sand Mountain's wooded slopes rise to form the southern end of Appalachia in the pine woods northeast of Birmingham, a group of tiny church congregations, too small to do much for their poorer members independently, banded together as the Sand Mountain Parishes. Together, they established a cooperative cannery to help them stretch the region's seasonal bounty of produce through the winter; and they started a building program that puts up small but sturdy solar-powered houses for the mountain's most ill-housed families. Now they're helping a group of single mothers form a home-building cooperative. That's self-reliance, too.

A quiet revolution is going on, all right, so quietly that hardly anybody outside the grassroots organizations themselves knows it is happening -- and they aren't talking much about it. The media, the government, even most funding organizations -- unfortunately -- don't get it at all. This is a shame, because some of this stuff is working, and way too many of the traditional welfare programs aren't. Are there lessons here? The more I traveled and the more I saw, the more I thought so.