So far, we’ve covered some of why ending poverty is achievable. In this section let’s talk about where this initiative came from.

A couple of places really.

First, the Level UP team was put together by myself and my best friend Declan. The two of us have developed 12 businesses over the past 25 years, all based on infinite business principles – a term coined by Dr. James Carse in 1985. In short, the principles at the core of these endeavors have been:

• to put people first, and

• to share the benefits.

Each member of Level UP’s founding team shares this ethos.

And where does your specific focus on Poverty come from?

Several founding members have direct, what we call, lived experience of poverty.

Rodney and Crystal, along with their three other siblings, lived in a condemned house with no windows or utilities until they got the chance to move into one of the poorest government projects, nicknamed the Brickyard, in Birmingham, Alabama.

As young children with virtually no resources or support, they stuck together, and all got through school; surviving for years almost exclusively on the little money Rodney earned and on the kindness of strangers. You can read about their early lives in one of Rodney’s books, “Me and Mary”. It’s an amazing and inspiring story.

I also recommend “Me and Mary”. It gives the reader an enlightening view into Civil Rights era poverty and one that focuses on the goodness of so many people from all sorts of backgrounds.

To clarify the title, Mary Moore was Rodney’s grandmother and is the remarkable person that this memoir is built around – A PDF of the book “Me and Mary” is available in the Resources Section of our website.

Continuing on with our founding team history. Linda lived her first 20 years on a reservation in North Dakota, and Jim grew up in his native Hawaii in a working-class “Ohana” raised by his Chinese-Hawaiian grandmother. Both Linda and Jim have been central to major environmental and social success stories. Declan grew up in a war zone with weekly bombings and daily roadblocks. The rest of us experienced enough hardship and oppression that we have little problem relating to people’s struggles.

Would you say that Rodney’s contribution is central?

Yes. The vision to end poverty comes down to Rodney’s life’s work - which is a deep dive into the mechanisms driving poverty today.

We call this reverse engineering poverty, and it identifies practical solutions we can build for people who are locked into poverty by the system.

Can you briefly talk about contributions from the rest of the team?

Yes, our founding team has worked together on the Level UP project for the past seven years. We have well over 500 years of combined business and development experience. As a group we brought together our talents, experience, and innovations, like pieces of a jigsaw, to form our philosophy, ethos, strategies, and the design for a series of practical tools.

These tools start with an underlying digital infrastructure. We call this the Level UP Green Economic Drivetrain because it supports new layers in an ever-expanding economy that is central to ending poverty. Version 1.2 of this drivetrain is complete and gives our App solutions capabilities and features that are future-facing and world-friendly.

Earlier you mentioned “practical solutions for people who are locked into poverty by the system”.

From understanding how poverty works - we are creating a platform of Level UP Apps that enable people to overcome the many systemic barriers they encounter when working to improve their lives.

To deliver and implement these solutions, we harness the goodwill and enlightened self-interest of more than 250,000 companies who want to, and are 100% ready to, participate on this journey.

I know we will get more into the specifics of these App solutions and your larger plan, but first, let’s cover some basics.

Sure.

Perhaps we should start here - how does Level UP Tech define poverty?

Poverty is any situation where a person cannot make the income required to live a sustainable life. In the future, this definition may expand.

That’s a broad definition.

It is. But it’s one that makes the most sense to us.

Isn’t poverty the result of human weakness?

No. We all have strengths and weaknesses, and we are not all poor.

How much change is possible?

Well, before addressing that, lets examine where poverty comes from. Most of us never ask this question because we assume that poverty is a fact of life, or that it is somehow poor people’s fault.

Ok, where does poverty come from?

First off, in every society, there’s always been a level of poverty.

But today, and throughout most of our country’s history, poverty is and has been driven by a system. This system includes societal rules and processes that create and maintain poverty.

Where do these rules come from?

Society makes and upkeeps the rules. The rules developed over decades, and in many cases over hundreds of years. While poverty has always been a part of human culture, our poverty system has its roots in war, slavery, and the industrial revolution and its mindset. We inherited it. We don’t question it because “it’s always been this way” and it “seems to make sense”. We don’t grasp its unfairness unless we experience it, but poor people do.

Why haven’t most people heard of a “poverty-driving system”?

As far as we know, it hasn’t been named. It is, in fact, a series of interlinked systems that are not immediately apparent. They show up when the causes of poverty are identified, analyzed, understood, and reverse-engineered.

Can you give an example of a poverty-driving system?

I can and will, but first, let’s remember that the system has a life of its own. And it has a specific purpose and has built other systems to protect itself.

Wasn’t it built by people?

Yes of course, but over time and step-by-step. The people who originally built the system earned a living from exploiting poor people – for example, slave labor, followed by chain gang labor, sharecropping, industrial labor, prison labor, and so forth. Profit was the motivation and people in poverty are the path to profit.

But these people are long gone but the systems still exist?

Correct.

And how do you describe the purpose of this poverty-driving system?

First of all, the goal is to extract as much value as possible from its commodities.

What are its commodities?

Its commodities are people. Or more specifically poor people’s lifetimes of labor, from which the system extracts ALL value.

At this stage, if we have a quick review of our work Reverse Engineering Poverty - that should allow the listeners to gain more clarity.

OK - Let’s break here and start on that point in Part 3.