The Poverty Story as a Conversation
INDEX
Click the drop down arrow for a brief summary of each section
Click Read More from within the drop down for a more detailed overview
Part 1 (A)
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In Part 1 (A) we cover:
What the Poverty Story conversation is about:
Poverty
Its inner workings, and
Its transformation.
Level UP’s mission to “End Poverty In One Generation”.
The factors that have lined up to make ending poverty possible:
Social and business readiness
Enlightened self-interest
An ethos of “we’re-all-in-this-together”.
Part 1 (B)
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In Part 1 (B) we cover:
“There’s a machine here”:
The driving force under and behind poverty is mechanistic, embedded, and well-disguised.
No finger-pointing:
It’s counter-productive
It’s divisive
It’s inaccurate
Level UP’s mission to “End Poverty In One Generation” is based on:
7-years of work by the team.
Completing an in-depth socio-cultural history of the U.S.
Reverse-Engineering the System that Profits from Poverty.
Building Level UP Apps that allow poor people to bypass many of the system’s barriers and climb up and out of poverty.
Using the companies and communities already aligned with the ethos of social responsibility to deliver and implement these solutions.
A fundamentally different approach to poverty based on:
Reverse engineering the system
Classic conflict resolution
We’re all in this together
Part 2
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In this section, we talk about:
The Level UP business model and how it can be successful.
Benefit Corporation
Profitable and self-sustaining
We help the business world to catch up with the people they serve.
Our market includes hundreds of thousands of companies who are committed to positive social impact.
Our solutions are designed for companies to simultaneously:
level the playing field for their workers
enhance company productivity
move towards sustainability
build a future facing ethos
Then we covered your funding strategy, which is designed to be inclusive, and
how people can participate.
Part 6
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In this part we talk about:
Where Level UP’s mission came from.
Our experience in poverty.
Introducing the book “Me and Mary” which is a window into poverty through Rodney and Crystal’s story.
A little on the Level UP team’s work over the past seven years.
Practical solutions for people trapped in poverty.
Your definition of:
poverty,
the poverty driving system and
its commodities.
Part 3
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In this part we talk about:
How we at Level UP reverse engineered poverty,
starting with the degenerative cycle that society uses to turn people into consumables, and from there to…
The 5 tactics that profit from poverty:
Under-compensation
Economic Impairment
Opportunistic Overcharging
Rent-Seeking
Social Disinvestment
How we are not treated equally.
How the “5 tactics that profit from poverty” consume every aspect of most working poor people’s lives today.
Part 4
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In this section, we examine:
An example of economic oppression through embedded systems.
Examples of surrounding systems that protect and enforce the system that profits from poverty.
Reverse engineering employment practices and job platforms.
The unhelpful barriers that most employment processes include today.
A real-life story of labor and poverty system experience from one of your careers illustrating:
conditional promotions and
conditional improvement of workers’ conditions.
how the system is configured to resist change
Part 5
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In this section, we discuss:
Ongoing societal change with some examples of how that comes about.
The demise of littering
The money spent on poverty today:
Relieves the symptoms of poverty which is vital for millions
Largely ignores the source, the system that profits from poverty
The Level UP approach is to starve the system of its raw materials:
The system profits from consuming people. The more people escape poverty, the less the system profits.
Overcoming “too-big” problems:
A comparable success story from one of your founding team, your sister Mary.
How her movement “We are the Ark” bypasses the barriers to a healthier and more sustainable global environment.
Part 7
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In this section, we discuss:
Complete Consumption of its Commodities
How many exploitative systems sit on top of our society today.
How exploitative systems can be brought to the brink of change… then slip away only to reinvent themselves under a new name, with even stronger protections in place.
We looked at “chew-up and spit-out” or complete consumption of commodities or raw materials as a hallmark of exploitative systems.
Then we ended with your personal story of your time in corporate acquisitions – which was and is an example of systemic exploitation and consumption of healthy companies for fast profits.
Part 9
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In this section, we discuss:
Exploitative and embedded systems:
Are not broken
Are protected and for the most part invulnerable to direct attack
Produce profits through exploitation
Are weakened by removing their commodities or raw materials
The barriers are:
the points where people are cut-off, blocked or trapped
often the points that use opaque, unfair, and discriminatory strategies
often the points where profits are extracted
can be bypassed using Apps that provide new strategies
Part 8
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Part 9 is a numbers section:
We reviewed various poverty definitions and thresholds including:
The US Census Bureau
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
MIT’s Living Wage
We examined three sectors of the US population:
Homeless or un-housed
The working poor
Workers who cannot and will not qualify for homeownership under the current housing management systems.
We found that these three nested groups make up 65% of our U.S. population, or 220 million people.
The majority of these people are living unsustainable lives and are our target beneficiaries of iPeerion’s Level UP Apps.
Part 10
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In this section, we discuss access to these three socioeconomic systems:
Employment
Housing
Cost of Living
These socioeconomic management systems control how most everyone accesses the necessities of a sustainable life. For example, work, housing, education, transport, food, healthcare, ownership of just about anything…
They are known as the Poverty Gatekeepers which selectively admit or reject people based on often arbitrary requirements or measurements.
These 3 areas are the focus of our First Level UP Apps that will be developed in 2024.
Part 11
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In this section, we explain how our Apps are like icebergs where the App itself is the tip of the iceberg and the part below the waterline provides services for the company and houses the infrastructure that gives the App and associated platform many unique features.
Part 12
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In this section, we discuss:
The Level UP Employment App
How the Level UP Employment App opens work advancement opportunities up to categories of people that are currently excluded or partially excluded.
It is also an overdue perspective shift, and an overhaul of the current systems – which represent the status quo which profits from poverty.
It tells a real-life story of people who “hold things together” in their workplaces. People who often go under-acknowledged and underpaid.
It modernizes the Employment Gatekeeper or more specifically how people qualify for, apply for, and upgrade their employment.
It describes, in some detail, 9 features of this App that are future facing improvements over the current system and provide advantages and benefits to the Applicant, the Employer, our work culture, and our communities.
Part 13
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In this section, we examine a personal real-world story of a European factory.
The key points are:
First, how building the work environment means:
Treating workers with respect.
Giving them ownership.
Trusting their input and insights.
Supporting diversity.
Secondly how this approach creates many high-value outcomes including increased company sustainability, creativity, safety, loyalty and profitability.
And third, the process of building and maintaining trust – and its advantages.
How all of these processes are related to the Level UP Apps.
Part 14
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In this section, we discuss:
The barriers poor people experience when trying to access or upgrade their home.
There are 5 main barriers to obtaining rental housing:
Old-world negative hierarchy
Protocols
Isolation
Fees and Bias
Zero Equity
and 3 for home ownership:
unaffordable
unrealistic requirements
down payment despair.
These systemic barriers are uncovered through reverse engineering the existing housing system – in particular its gatekeepers.
Many of these barriers are bypassed through use of the Housing Stability Level UP App.
Then we covered the importance of housing stability and the goals of the App:
To put both independent housing and homeownership within reach of every household with an income of $30,000/year.
Help foster a market of even cheaper, creatively structured options that allow most everyone to, by retirement, have a home they own.
We finished with the story of Crystal, Damien and HomeWorks helps unhoused people become homeowners.
Part 15
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Paul’s family progress over the past 150 years in Ireland, and how it illustrates:
First, how slavery, oppression, poverty are all systems that distribute profits.
Secondly how these systems are universal and resistant to interruption.
Third, how they teach or spread the practice of exploitation.
And fourth, some of the ways land ownership confers anti-poverty advantages over generations.
Part 16
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In this section, we talk about:
How people hear about our Apps through friends or through their interactions with companies that employ our Level UP Solutions.
We talked a little about Level UP’s history in diversity, understanding the role of diversity and the route to building diversity in companies.
How our Level UP Solutions help today’s companies becoming Future-Facing:
Adopt new mindsets
Evaluate entrenched processes
Replace discriminatory practices
Become more welcoming
Address embedded bias
Put people, community, and planet first
Share the benefits
Part 17
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In this section, we cover:
The barriers poor people experience when trying to use their limited resources to access important goods or services:
Over-charging
Inferior products or services
Absence of discounts.
No reimbursements offered.
Limited selection.
Escalating negative consequences
How these barriers are employed by almost all companies including socially responsible ones.
How the Level UP Purchasing Power App helps people bypass these barriers:
It builds a marketplace for companies and products designed to benefit working people not exploit them.
It respects privacy, provides quality customer service.
Abolishes unfair practices.
Shares benefits such as equity and dividends to the degree possible.
Part 18
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This section covers:
Today’s worldwide Ownership Economy includes millions of people who were historically excluded from ownership and participation. And how the emerging Ownership Economy allows the upswelling of social initiatives that are central to bypassing our existing poverty enforcing systems.
Descriptions of the inner workings of:
Web 2.0
Web 3.0
And Ethereum as an example of the Worldwide Economy
Level UP is focused on:
Expanding ownership as part of ending poverty in one generation.
This includes ownership of our homes, our work lives, our workplaces, our retirement, our bodies, our health, our education, our creative output, our data… and our world,
and how ownership includes records, participation, and control
and how Web 3 and the Ownership Economy are developments that reflect our societies progress toward sharing the benefits.
Part 19
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Why control of records is so important for implementing the Degenerative Cycle and to protect old-school systems that exploit people and the planet for profit.
Then we cover descriptions and examples of :
Good record keeping
Modern record keeping – Blockchain
The terms immutable, transparent, distributed, hacking-resistant, and failsafe.
The Green Economic Drivetrain includes automated blockchain based records that empower:
The Ownership Economy
The Level UP Company Share App
