Hello and welcome to Giving Ventures, a show to help you grow your giving and change the world for the better.

Our conversations with social entrepreneurs and generous philanthropists highlight innovative charitable efforts and smart ways to have more impact with your giving.

I'm your host, Peter Lipsett, Vice President

at Donors Trust. This show is a production of Donors Trust, the oldest and largest donor-advised

fund focused on serving conservative and libertarian donors of all capacities to simplify,

protect, and grow their giving. My colleagues and I talk with a lot of groups doing

great work. With Giving Ventures, we can share a bit of what we learn with you. By any objective

measure, people around the world are richer, significantly richer in a lot of cases than they

were even 10 years ago, certainly 50, 100 years ago.

There's the old trope that a plumber in Peoria today is better off than King Louis at Versailles.

And yet we continue to fight the so-called war on poverty.

We see poverty all around us.

We align our charitable giving to help the homeless,

to feed people and clothe them and support food banks. We know there are problems, and yet these

solutions that we throw out there don't seem to solve things. The answer seems elusive.

Several years ago, some of you listening and watching may have seen the film Poverty, Inc.,

which was put out by our friends at the Acton Institute, a great documentary that was a real

indictment of the global aid industrial complex, if you will, the food and humanitarian aid

supporting people in the poorest places on earth.

And the efforts that are part of that complex aim to alleviate poverty, and yet as a film made clear, in many cases, those handouts only make it worse.

Well, now the same team is at it again, turning the lens inward at the United States

to try to figure out the problems of poverty here at home and the solutions that

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