I wrote a story about him in The Louisville Times, and donations of cash, canned goods, used eyeglasses, offers of prayers and wishes of hope came pouring in. That made me feel good . . . and the fact that a man had to live like that in Louisville, Kentucky, U.S.A. in the 1980s made me feel bad. Interviewing food-stamp recipients and unemployed people as a newspaper reporter in my own home town, I'd seen up close how bad things were getting for poor people. I wouldn't have minded mounting a journalistic crusade to change all that, but I could never impress my editors that things like this were really happening to real people in Louisville or that they were important.

Move forward a few years, add one Pulitzer Prize to the newspaper's collection for the news staff's coverage of a fiery bus crash that killed 27 youngsters on a spring night in rural Kentucky. The Times was dead, merged into the morning Courier-Journal; and Gannett Corp. had bought the local media empire from Louisville's Bingham family. Things were changing fast, and not even a piece of a Pulitzer could keep me from feeling restless. When I learned about an unusual project being sketched at a non-profit organization in New York City, I knew I had to get in on it.

The leaders of World Hunger Year (WHY), a non-profit organization that had long focused its efforts on international hunger, were deeply concerned about how badly hunger and poverty had gotten out of control here in the United States. Bill Ayres, a former Catholic priest and long-time radio talk-show host, had founded the organization in 1975 with his friend and partner, the late folksinger and songwriter Harry Chapin. Ayres and Dr. James Chapin, Harry's older brother, a college professor and expert on poverty issues, noticed a surprising development as they reviewed applications for the organization's small grants program, the Harry Chapin Food Self-Reliance Award. Over just a year or two, a remarkable number of grassroots groups had suddenly evolved into broader arenas from their original single-purpose operations as soup kitchens or rescue missions. They weren't just providing emergency food and or shelter any more. Suddenly they were dealing with housing, job training, economic development. They were teaching poor people how to become self-reliant again. What's more, many of the organizations weren't just relying on private contributions and volunteers. They had formed partnerships with government, getting at least part of their support from local, state or federal agencies.

No national organization, public or private, was tracking this development or even, apparently, aware that it was going on. Certainly, no one was making any real effort to identify the most innovative and successful grassroots organizations with an eye toward replicating their efforts.

I enlisted at that point, and within weeks, we had designed the program that we would call "Reinvesting in America." This would be a hybrid of advocacy and journalism: I would travel all over the nation, using a reporter's tools to find as many grassroots programs fighting hunger and poverty as I could. I would single out the most innovative, visit them, interview the people in charge and the people they served. I would write down whatever I found, and we'd assemble my findings into a computer database that we hoped would show us new and exciting patterns. We refined the concept as we went along: We would introduce grassroots activists to each other so they could share their inventions. We would tell reporters about these individuals and their groups, and teach them how to get media attention. We would urge foundations and corporate grants-makers to support the best initiatives with cash. We would hold the best grassroots programs up to government policy-makers to consider as models for new and better ways of delivering social services. We would make the database comprehensive and user-friendly, and we would offer the information it contained for free to anyone interested in fighting hunger and poverty in America. And of course, when we got it all figured out, I would write this book.

Too impatient to wait for funding, I hit the road, relying on the "float" time before credit-card bills came back and on a little help from our friends like the Harry Chapin Foundation, which pledged to pay my salary; and singer Bruce Springsteen, an old friend of Harry Chapin's, who told Ayres that he liked this idea -- and proved he meant it by writing a generous check.

My first trip, a swing through Tidewater country, Washington, D. C., and the Appalachian regions of Virginia and Kentucky, filled a fat notebook with the first batch of stories. There were outstanding efforts going on out there, and it wasn't that hard to find them. The interview process was no different from what I'd done as a reporter. Neither was the task of turning interviews into articles and assembling the information I found into usable form.

Back to New York, another flurry of telephone calls, and I was off again, this time to northwestern Ohio's pickle-growing country, where I met the dedicated folks at the Farm Labor Organizing Council and learned that fighting hunger can take the form of organizing migrant farm workers to fight for fair salaries and decent working and living conditions. This, I thought, was definitely better than passing out leftover restaurant food at soup kitchens. I met Kent Beittel, one of the most colorful individuals in the national fight against homelessness a guy who threw away the rule book in order to help recover people's lives at The Open Shelter, within sight of the Ohio Capitol in Columbus. Next, a foray to the Rustbelt regions turned up the Milwaukee job-training program Esperanza Unida, a non-profit auto-repair shop that produces skilled technicians capable of earning high pay on the local economy. I continued traveling monthly, spending about a quarter of my time on the road and the rest digging up information about outstanding programs and writing down what I learned. Now, four years later, I've been through more than 200 cities, towns and villages in all 50 states, visited more than 500 programs, and become increasingly aware that we've only scratched the surface. But the shape of things is coming clear, and there's hope in it.