Why have so many of our well-intended efforts to change the lives of poor people failed? With the examples of hundreds of programs that do work to guide us, the answer to this frustrating question starts to come clear: We have simply failed to ask the right questions, to treat the right symptoms and to set the right goals.

This failure of goal-setting follows a consistent pattern, and it reflects the difference between dispensing charity and nurturing change. If the goal is merely to address a short-term symptom and not to address the underlying malaise, nothing changes. It isn't always easy to communicate this difference, because well-meaning people, believing that charity is decent and kind, sometimes don't understand that charity can be both good and insufficient. Some see charity as a supplement to (or worse, a replacement for) our current welfare system, which admittedly doesn't work very well. But neither, frankly, does traditional charity, which offers a hand out but not a hand up -- even in the cases where it comes with no particular strings attached.

So we face the frustration of seeing soup kitchens that feed hungry people but don't question why the same people keep coming back hungry again. Shelters provide beds for homeless men, but make little effort to learn what in these men's lives are keeping them on the street. We build houses for homeless people, but we don't necessarily consider the needs of the people who will live in them. We establish job-training programs but don't ask whether the graduates got jobs, or were even trained for jobs that exist. We try to treat the symptoms, but we don't always recognize the disease. In short, returning to the simple notion that opened this book, we give people fish -- and sometimes only a scanty portion at that -- but we all too rarely teach them to fish.

The most effective grassroots initiatives that do "teach people to fish" consistently return to several basic premises: Changing people's lives is labor-intensive work. You can't rush 1,000 people through a program in a week and expect them to walk out with jobs and lives that are whole. It's necessary to work one on one with people, respecting their intelligence and capabilities and at the same time being as tough as you need to be. It takes competent, creative and honest people to run successful programs, once they've got the resources that they need to get the job done; and they have to be left pretty much alone in order to do it.

But the most important lesson we learn at America's grassroots is this: Even the most apparently intractable groups of people in poverty are composed mostly of decent folks who just want a chance to make a living and support themselves and their families. If you give them a reasonable chance to work their way out of poverty -- a chance that they can recognize as honest and practical -- just about everyone will grab for it.

The spread of visible homelessness, hunger and poverty in our country since the early 1980s has left scars on individuals and on the political landscape. But it has also left a surprising legacy of hope, as Americans of good spirit have stepped in to do a job that needed to be done. Based on the programs I've seen and the hundreds of creative poverty-fighters I've met across the nation, I'm convinced that we can look to these small-scale, local efforts to find responses to hunger and poverty that are not only more effective but more humane than our current social-services and welfare programs. These new responses are not based on the inventions of office-bound bureaucrats or policy gurus but the common-sense ideas of everyday Americans who've seen a problem and done what needed to be done to fix it.

How can we turn the best grassroots initiatives into new national models for fighting poverty through self-reliance and personal initiative? We need to take a completely new look at the way we deliver welfare and social services. As the best grassroots programs do, we must build on the strengths of poor people rather than assume that their weaknesses will forever defeat them. We must foster individual self-reliance, recognize it in people and nurture it. And we must take fullest advantage of every opportunity to build partnerships between government and the non-profit groups that have demonstrated creativity, competence and skill at what they do.

Let's take a closer look at 10 specific principles we've learned from America's most effective grassroots poverty fighters. Each of these principles holds clear lessons for non-profit groups and the people who lead them. If we can pass these lessons along to every state, city and town with the evidence of the programs that work best, and establish similar efforts there with the guidance but not the heavy hand of government, we can put hunger and poverty on the run.

1. Establish partnerships between federal, state and local governments and non-profit organizations, ensuring that every community has competent programs delivering a complete range of services that foster self-reliance, and that these services are creative and well-run.

This is by no means a call for blanket funding for non-profit organizations without regard to their capabilities or their mission. Neither taxpayers nor government will soon forget the scandals in some early Community Action Agencies and Community Development grant programs, when naive supervisors dumped money into poor communities without sufficient oversight, only to be surprised to see program workers suddenly showing up for work in new cars and sporting fancy jewelry.

But the local programs that have demonstrated competence and the ability to create and deliver programs that help people get themselves back into the community and back to work should stand as models for nationwide replication and taxpayer support. Government has demonstrated a proven ability to write checks, but the record of welfare programs like Aid to Families With Dependent Children and the often unpleasant and error-ridden approach of welfare bureaucrats does nothing to build confidence in the system.

Just as authorities like David Osborne advise reinventing government by fashioning partnerships between it and the private sector, it's equally worth while to examine similarly inventive partnerships marrying government and the best non-profit organizations. Non-profits have demonstrated a consistent ability to understand local problems and overcome them with creative, flexible approaches, and they can do it without writing in a budget line for the stockholders. But they rarely have sufficient resources to get the job done. When we bring together government money and local enterprise, with appropriate oversight and full access to the process for citizens and the media, good things start to happen.

San Antonio's Project Quest, for instance, drew on $3.7 million in federal and state money, and needs a similar amount each year for its job training program, which will place 600 workers into high-paying, skilled jobs in two years. That breaks down to a little more than $6,000 a year for every worker's training and support. This is not a bad deal for people like Cynthia Scott, the program's first graduate, who went directly from training to a hospital job paying her $18,720 plus benefits. Before Project Quest, Ms. Scott was receiving AFDC, a dole that paid her $3,252 a year to support herself and her three children.

2. Manage by objectives. Set smart goals and come up with simple, direct approaches that will take you straight to them.

This fundamental principle of modern management theory is too often overlooked in the non-profit sector. "Train 100 workers" or "build 100 houses" are lofty objectives, but "Get 100 workers trained and placed in permanent jobs" and "get 100 families established in decent houses that they can afford" are better, more specific goals. The best non-profit managers understand management by objectives, and they plan their programs by setting the goals they really want to accomplish and then coming up with pragmatic ways to get that job done.

Milwaukee's Esperanza Unida followed a straight, focused path to a clearly defined goal: Look for economic niches in the community, available jobs that reward attainable skills with good pay and benefits -- auto repairs, welding, building trades, family day care. Then start small non-profit businesses in which young people can learn those skills under experienced mentors, while the business earns money to help support the organization itself.

3. Foster self-reliance by building on people's strengths.

This turns on its head the foolish concept that underlies Aid to Families with Dependent Children, which requires that mothers who accept its grant decline work -- even part-time work -- and avoid forming families for fear of losing the dole and the health-care insurance benefits for themselves and their children tied to it.

DC Central Kitchen, the organization in Washington, D.C., that collects usable food leftovers and converts them into healthy meals for hungry people, understands this concept and puts it into practice by hiring homeless men to do its work, learning employable skills in the process. It stands out from scores of other "restaurant gleaning" programs across the nation that do a good job of feeding hungry people but mobilize affluent volunteers to do the work, missing the chance to employ and train the very people they are trying to help.

All the grassroots Grameen banks, small-business incubators and non-profit venture-loan organizations, in similar fashion, recognize that a pool of skills, talent and ambition exists among even the groups most hammered by poverty. By giving these people the tools they need and a quick loan to get themselves started, these organizations foster the development of businesses that, however small they start, may eventually boost the economies of their own communities.

4. Use the "holistic" approach, bringing a full array of tools to bear on each individual's problems.

For many years, government social-services programs and non-profit charities alike typically focused on doing a single job and, it is to be hoped, doing it well.

On the government side, unemployment offices handled unemployment insurance; food-stamp offices distributed food stamps; welfare offices handled AFDC; social-security offices were responsible for payments to elderly and disabled people, and so it went. Officialdom neither thought about, nor apparently cared about, the time and convenience of recipients, who were expected to trudge from one office to another to another, waiting in line at each to fill out separate forms and await separate decisions from separate bureaucrats. The lessons we've learned from "one-stop-shopping" welfare operations like those in Westminster, Md., which consolidated both the offices and the forms they use, are valuable because they not only reduce the human toll on the recipients but cut the cost of running the welfare bureaucracy for government as well.

For non-profit poverty fighters, "holistic" has a somewhat different meaning. With few exceptions, the grassroots programs that have proven themselves most effective at turning people's lives around do so not by focusing on a single problem but on identifying every problem that stands between the individual and recovery, and providing or finding a way to get the assistance that this individual needs. As Margie Smith of Trinity Ministry to the Poor in Dallas cogently observed, "The Band-Aid approach or the 'quick fix' that addresses only the symptoms has got to stop . . . We literally technically evaluate a family, trying first to determine what the problems are, then setting up a specific program to fix them."

Failure to comprehend this dooms the most well-intended self-reliance programs. The best job-training program won't keep its graduates at work if it ignores the need for drug and alcohol counseling. A food pantry that gives away unfamiliar or difficult-to-prepare foodstuffs shouldn't be surprised if the recipients of its largesse seem ungrateful. A program that puts formerly homeless people into permanent housing can't expect them to be able to stay there if they can't pay the rent. These conclusions may seem thoroughly reasonable, but a surprising number of grassroots efforts have been all too satisfied to ignore them, preferring to do a single task and declare that the rest of the effort, alas, is "not our job."

5. Deal with individuals, one-on-one. Poverty is not best fought on an assembly line.

The Recovery Program in Atlanta's Cafe 458 is as good an example as I've found to illustrate this simple but sometimes frustrating principle. Working with only a dozen homeless drug addicts at a time, giving them food and conversation and emotional support and even that unruly thing named love, the Cafe's committed staff can only work with a handful of individuals at a time, saving six while they'd love to be salvaging 1,000. It's a slow, painstaking and infinitely rewarding process, but it's not one that can be mechanized and used to churn out clean, working, mentally healthy people by the battalion.

Food stamps and AFDC and other necessary interventions handle people by the numbers. They make a difference, but they're not where we look for warmth or humanity or, frankly, building self-reliance. That's a task requiring more personal effort, and to make it happen all over America is going to require a lot of work by a lot of grassroots people who care enough to do it.

As Phil, one of the Cafe's clients who came from the drug life to a fulfilling job as a counselor, told us: "Daily, long-term, that is what's needed. You can't do it in a short period of time. It takes building a foundation. . . . The dedication of the people who work here . . . is long-term."

And it works.

6. The "Mr. Goodwrench" principle: Intervene early ("Pay me now or pay me later") and anticipate problems before they occur.

As television's "Mr. Goodwrench" warns, you can maintain your car before it falls apart, or you can wait until an emergency forces you to respond. The best grassroots programs presume a similar principle about the much more important business of maintaining people's lives before they fall apart.

Two of the most effective government welfare programs rest on this principle: The federal nutrition program for Women, Infants and Children, known as WIC, has been shown to save $3 in health-care costs for every $1 it spends on food for pregnant and nursing mothers and children -- and despite this proven record, it still receives funding in most states sufficient to feed only about half of the eligible population. The Head Start program, one of the greatest surviving success stories of the Great Society of the 1960s, also boasts a long track record of preparing youngsters for a thriving, passing record in elementary and secondary school.

At the grassroots level, the Goodwrench Principle informs all of the effective programs that understand the importance of nurturing, feeding and educating children and ensuring their health and strength. Holy Cross School in Florida's cane country, for instance, gets the children of Guatemalan refugees off to a soaring start in life that may help them avoid the problems in the next generation that have stymied their parents in this one.

Shorter-term intervention is a pragmatic initiative too, as in the Louisville school system's inventive notion of rounding up the younger sisters of pregnant teens and filling them up with good advice about avoiding the mess that Big Sis got herself into. Tacoma's Martin Luther King Center brings the Goodwrench Principle to bear in its efforts to locate families on the brink of becoming homeless and doing whatever it can -- through advice, referrals or even a quick cash loan -- to keep them in the house they're in, eliminating the need to meet them next week as new homeless residents of the Center's shelter. We see it again in Cities in Schools and the other education programs that single out students whose grades and behavior suggests that they are "at risk" of dropping out, and wrapping them in a blanket of tutoring and support sufficient to restore their confidence and keep them in school.

7. Leadership makes a difference: The best grassroots leaders are charismatic, competent, flexible, unafraid to innovate, unafraid to break the rules (if not the law).

If any one thread runs through all the best grassroots organizations, it's the presence of a leader who's bold, creative and willing to take risks.

Richard Oulahan demonstrated that at Esperanza Unida when he defied the conventional wisdom by setting up a commercial business -- an auto-repair shop -- as a non-profit job-training agency. People like Oulahan may stop and check the facts, but they don't simply back away when they hear the old worried song, "You can't do that!"

Kent Beittel, the street minister who's coming up with new ways to reward homeless people for working their way off the street, wears the title "maverick" with considerable pride. So does Carolyn Lanier, who's made the food bank in Lubbock a model for the Southern Plains, over the once-frequent but now diminishing protests of the national food-bank bureaucracy. Westminster's Sylvia Cannon had to write a new rule book -- a concept that most social workers would regard as utterly bizarre -- to make her welfare office in Carroll County, Maryland, into a national model. And in Seattle, Roberto Maestas and his crew literally took the law into their own hands to take the building that the establishment wouldn't give them to house Centro de la Raza; and scratch any grassroots community organizer anywhere, like Carlos Marentes of the El Paso chile-pepper pickers or Tirso Moreno in the Florida orange groves or Baldemar Velasquez in the Ohio tomato and cucumber country, and you'll find a hell-raiser who'd rather question authority than bow to it.

None of this suggests that grassroots leaders should be rebels without a cause; and without exceptions, the honor roll I've listed here represents people who know how to work within the system and do it very well. But the best leaders know when to lead, and they know when leadership means getting out in front of the establishment, the conventional wisdom, and even sometimes one's own board of directors.

8. Join forces, fill the gaps, coalesce. Work together to meet the community's overall need.

Just as the "holistic" approach pays dividends in working with individuals, grassroots groups can profit when they recognize a common cause and join hands with other organizations fighting similar or related battles. The Montana-based Western Organization of Resource Councils provides an excellent example of a working umbrella organization: It creates a network of information and planning that statewide organizations of family farmers and ranchers in seven states can share, sparing the effort and expense of reinventing the wheel, while each state group (and, in fact, community organizations within the state group) retain complete autonomy. Statewide coalitions of organizations working on behalf of hungry and homeless people offer similar benefits, with particularly good models in Maryland, Idaho, Alabama and Minnesota.

In at least three communities -- Anchorage, Alaska, Reno, Nevada, and Nashville, Tennessee -- I found unusually effective, yet thoroughly informal, webs of grassroots organizations that are moving toward covering all the gaps in services in their regions by recognizing that a team effort can often accomplish what an individual can't. The social services arena and nonprofits in general have a bad reputation for turf battles. The lessons from these towns where people have learned better offer powerful examples of the battles that can be won when good people and good groups work together.

9. Involve the community in what you do. There's strength in support as well as in dollars.

Even if we build government partnerships to support and replicate the best grassroots iniatives against hunger and poverty, it's safe to predict that the non-profit world will never be fat with cash and property. Some of the strongest and best organizations I've found are those that enlist individuals and businesses within their communities as willing partners, providing both work and contributions.

Phoenix's Homeward Bound and Bridge programs, for instance, mobilize churches and businesses to provide both financial support and volunteers to help get homeless families back into the mainstream, and they are building a remarkable record of success with as many as nine of every 10 families they serve. Nashville's Room in the Inn houses hundreds of homeless people on winter nights entirely through joint efforts by dozens of the city's churches, providing a needed service in an efficient, organized fashion. Dr. Scott Morris of the Church Health Center in Memphis mobilized scores of the city's physicians to deliver health-care to uninsured working people; and in Anchorage, Alaska, Bean's Cafe enlists the people of its community with fund-raising and volunteer-motivating initiatives that range from bean soup cook-offs to the sale of a slick cookbook assembled by the families of the workers who gathered to help clean up the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

Most of the people in a community who've avoided bad luck for now will recognize, when it's pointed out, that it's best for them and their town, too, when something's being done to fight the problems of hunger, poverty and homelessness there. Give them half a chance, and they'll get busy doing something about it.

10. One more time: Change is better than charity. "Teach a man to fish."

Putting it all together, one thing becomes clear: There is no "silver bullet" that will slay poverty, no single solution that will cure it and all its evils. But in my travels to hundreds of outstanding organizations in all 50 states, I've seen the shape of something better: A golden blanket, a gentle and supporting network that can cover all the needs of people who haven't been able to share the American dream. This blanket, woven from dozens of threads, can be completed in any community that chooses to replicate all the best of the grassroots programs, the innovative partnerships that -- with the essential ingredient of government support -- can put domestic hunger and poverty out of business.

Ending hunger and poverty will require more than just giving people free lunch and grocery baskets. It demands a network of services that don't just feed people but help them feed themselves. Food, housing, education, job training, child care and family support, counseling and health care and economic development and political organizing: It's all connected, and it can all be provided, as a matter of local and national policy, by people of good will working with their government, each doing what they do best.