Kirsten Lodal was a 19-year-old sophomore at Yale University when she co-founded Lift, an anti-poverty charity that has won acclaim for putting poor people in the driver’s seat. Highly trained volunteers have helped about 100,000 people devise and execute customized financial plans to improve their economic circumstances.
Now, nearly 18 years later, Ms. Lodal is transforming the nonprofit that has been her life’s work. Instead of making its services available to everyone, as it has in the past, Lift has sharpened its focus to the parents of young children.
“The idea of being all things to all people, while noble on its face, was pretty unattainable,” says Ms. Lodal, 36, the group’s chief executive. People struggling with mental-health issues and addiction needed professional help that the charity’s volunteers couldn’t provide. “We had to get a lot more discerning as an organization about where we could have the greatest impact.”
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The bet that Ms. Lodal and the organization are making: Helping parents improve their financial stability during their children’s critical early years of development will reduce the instability and toxic stress that often accompany poverty.
Lift’s goals are much grander than simply making people’s lives a little more comfortable, says Ms. Lodal: “We really are committed to doing everything we can to try to break the cycle of poverty in families.”
The transition hasn’t been easy. Lift helped clients who weren’t parents of young children obtain assistance at other charities. It relocated its operations to places that were more convenient for parents, such as community centers and children’s health clinics.
“We don’t want to add to the challenges that people face in receiving services,” Ms. Lodal says.
At the same time, the charity carefully examined the financial footing of its locations and closed down operations in Boston and Philadelphia. It continues to work in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and Washington.
Too often, Ms. Lodal says, nonprofits “don’t take the hard look in the mirror that we need to take when it’s time to evolve the model or the operating structure or the financial underpinnings — or all of the above.”
Lift’s evolution has been shaped in part by research in brain science and behavioral economics. For example, in addition to asking parents about economic measures of success, like employment and housing, the organization also asks about less tangible measures, like their confidence and sense of social connectedness.
Research gives greater credibility to things like stress, self-confidence, and feelings of attachment that can seem touchy-feely without science to back them up, says Ms. Lodal.
“Too often those factors have been written off as the soft stuff in our work,” she says. “We actually believe that’s the stuff.”
What hasn’t changed in Lift’s transition is its focus on self-determination. Ms. Lodal believes that for real change to happen people need to make their own choices and have control over their lives — advantages that are distributed unequally based on race and class.
Brain science has helped shape her charity’s approach to helping the poor.
She points to her experience as a white, professional woman and the mother of three young children.
“Based on my position of privilege in society, there’s no question that I am the CEO of my family and critical to my children’s early development,” she says. That’s not how society usually thinks about disadvantaged parents, she says. Instead, the focus is how institutions can improve the lives of their children.
“We take a very different approach at Lift,” says Ms. Lodal. “We believe that these parents are the experts on their own lives and deserve to be the chief architects of their families’ future.”
This is the latest installment of a new series, On the Rise, that profiles people making a difference in the nonprofit world.
