Part of our 2015 summer intern program includes a master class with our Chief Program Officer, Michael M. Weinstein on poverty, policy and metrics. Below are reflections from our interns on what they learned and how they felt after the master class.
Michael Weinstein is one of the most interesting and intelligent people that I have ever listened to. The ease with which he can float between fields of study, interconnect them, and use them to make an articulate point is incredible. But it is more than his shear intelligence that I found inspiring, it is his ability to use his wide ranging knowledge base and use that to benefit the lives of others. What surprised me most about Michael’s presentation yesterday was his ability to convey such complex topics so eloquently to a group of untrained interns. – Henry Molner
A slightly funny but also admirable quality of Michael’s was his ability to answer every single question we threw at him with an interesting and in-depth explanation, even if he prefaced his answer with something like “I don’t know how to answer that question.” – Kate Madoff
Overall from the entire presentation, I took away that Robin Hood can be described as an investment company that solely invests in NYC and just as in a regular investment in the Wall Street stock market, there are risk factors which Robin Hood has to take into account, but instead of having money as the profit, for Robin Hood the profit is improving someone’s life and deterring them from living in poverty. – Marlon Rodriguez
Is it harmful to have too many nonprofits all working towards fighting the same cause? When thinking about how many organizations there are total, and how many of them aren’t successful, I wonder if it would be better if all of the nonprofits came together and pooled resources in order to create a few incredibly strong organizations that reach more people. My biggest takeaway was something that Michael said, “It’s very important to not take credit for things you didn’t do.”
I’ve never thought about how important that sentence is when it comes to charitable organizations, but it makes all the sense in the world. – Elly Blum
I learned that policy can really make a difference in fighting poverty. I did not know how effective social security was in reducing poverty, and how much worse poverty would be without it. I also learned the difference between the alternative rate and the official rate, and was surprised to learn that the official rate is so broad and all encompassing even though there is so much difference among different areas in the US. – Molly Chandler
What surprised me most about the presentation was the impact government funding had in decreasing the poverty rates. Social security and food stamps play a huge part in decreasing the amount of people living in poverty because it adds on to the family’s pre-tax cash income. Michael emphasized that policy is actually doing a good job to fight poverty despite its persistence, and we should continue to spend our time modifying the existing policies as well as creating new and better ones. – Yael Bermudez
I really enjoyed the graph that demonstrated what the poverty level in various countries would be without government intervention. Many of the Nordic countries, which are known for their progressive social welfare policies, would actually have similar poverty levels as the U.S. without them. It shows how important nationwide policy changes are….The metrics are imperfect and evolving, but they are good tools for thinking through what a program is trying to achieve and whether it is on track to achieving that. – Crystal Avila
I was very surprised that Michael said that poverty rates are falling. Due to women in the workforce, that makes sense, but looking around, it does not feel that way. There seem to be so many people in need now and I can’t imagine that number being even larger in the past. – Jordyn Bernstein
A key take away for me was when Michael explained that fighting poverty is not just giving people money so that they do not fall in a specific bracket but to take poverty as a whole and find the most effective way to eliminate it within our society as much as possible. Poverty is not only defined by quantity; the quality of someone’s life is just as important if not more important than the financial bracket they fall under. – Francina Genao
I was surprised to learn that the metrics used by Robin Hood is used as a supplemental tool for Robin Hood to use when selecting where to give grants. I thought that the metrics system was a larger part of the decision making process, but after listening to the presentation it made a lot of sense that many other factors go into choosing where to donate. I especially liked the comparison to SAT scores used when applying to college, I thought that it made the process easier to understand and more relatable to our lives. – Brooke Ruffa
I’ve always known that $20,000 was way below what the poverty line should be in most states but I just never had the in depth knowledge about the flaws of the system, nor have taken much time to research a better alternative. – Ish Pieter
