This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, April 16, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

What is the role of the private sector in addressing poverty?

At a Cato event in New York, Harriet Carr McDonald,

President of the Doe Foundation,

discussed some of the alternatives to government welfare programs

in alleviating poverty.

Almost 30 years ago, my husband George and I decided to solve a problem.

Thousands and thousands of homeless people had appeared

in transportation terminals, on our streets, and in our subways.

We're Americans and we're patriots and we're family people.

We came from careers in business, not social work, and we were convinced that

homelessness could be solved. We believed in then as we do now that work is the solution to poverty.

To us, it wasn't the homeless people or the people returning from prison that were the problem.

It was the way we as a nation saw them.

My husband and I spent months and months in Grand Central Terminal getting to know homeless people

personally.

My husband fed those people for 700 nights in a row,

and he never missed a night.

I can tell you that. What the people told us again and again the people on the floor of

Grand Central Terminal that what they wanted was a room and a job to pay for it and we believe them.

Since then as an organization we have generated three quarters of a billion dollars in revenue.

...