Bob Woodson, an author and longtime community advocate, told Senator John Johnson on the Politica Podcast in Utah that many federal poverty programs have failed to reach the people they were meant to help and that local, grassroots leaders are the most effective agents of community recovery.

Woodson said he was born in 1937 in a low-income Black neighborhood in Philadelphia and described experiences that shaped his approach to working with young people and struggling neighborhoods. "I was born in during the depression, 19 37 in a low income black neighborhood in Philadelphia," he said, tracing a path from military service and work in juvenile corrections to scholarship and community organizing.

Why it matters: Woodson's account and prescriptions touch on debates about how governments, foundations and universities should direct money and programs to reduce poverty, how to measure results, and the role of identity-based programming in education and social policy.

Woodson argued that much public funding has flowed to organizations that serve the poor rather than directly to poor people themselves. "My study showed me that 70% of all the money, 22,000,000,000,000, we have spent over the last 25 years, last 50 years, have gone not to the poor, but those who serve the poor," he said. He framed the problem as one of misplaced incentives: funding systems, he said, too often reward institutions instead of fostering local entrepreneurs and caregivers who restore neighborhoods from within.

Woodson described a recurring success pattern he calls the "Josephs": local individuals or couples who take in at-risk youth and rebuild social ties. He recounted one example in Philadelphia where a couple offered sanctuary to young men involved in gangs and, within a few years, expanded to several houses and large numbers of formerly at-risk youths living and working together. "If we're all living here, we have to work, we have to be clean, we have to settle our differences," he said of that program.

He said his first book, The Summons to Life, and later work documented these social entrepreneurs' methods and results. "I wanted to find out why and how" violent crime fell dramatically in a neighborhood he studied, he said, describing in-person research with community leaders and scholars.

On identity politics and higher education policy, Woodson said focusing on race as a primary explanatory framework distorts how to help children across communities. "The biggest crisis that we have isn't a race problem. We have a grace problem," he said. He argued that both affluent and poor children face serious adversity — citing suicide rates in some wealthy communities and drug deaths in Appalachia — and that labeling groups as privileged or victimized may undermine personal agency.

Throughout the interview, Woodson emphasized local action: recruiting and funding grassroots leaders whom he said effectively rebuild community institutions such as family networks, local mentorship, and neighborhood-based learning. "We need to fund them," he said when discussing grassroots leaders in Utah and elsewhere.

Senator John Johnson, the program host, prompted examples from Woodson's past research and local projects and at several points noted Utah organizations and university responses that Woodson highlighted.

Ending: Woodson closed by urging wealthy donors, foundations and state actors to reallocate some resources from think tanks and political campaigns to on-the-ground organizations that directly restore neighborhoods, and to let grassroots leaders lead public presentations rather than speaking for them. "When the time comes for a public presentation stand with them, don't speak for them, let them speak for themselves," he said.