Empowerment beyond dependency. A cross-partisan policy framework that treats the poor as agents of their own flourishing—not as cases to be managed.
What if the most effective anti-poverty programs in America share a single operating principle that neither political party has fully embraced?
Oklahoma has one of the highest poverty rates in the nation. One in six Oklahomans lives below the federal poverty line. One in five children. The state incarcerates women at a rate that exceeds every other state in the union. Payday lenders outnumber McDonald’s locations in most Oklahoma counties. And yet the state also hosts some of the most innovative empowerment programs in the country—programs that are producing extraordinary results with almost no national attention.
This paper argues that the most promising anti-poverty work in America is not happening along the left-right axis. It is happening in a third space—one rooted in an older idea: that the poor are not broken people who need management, but capable people who lack the institutional infrastructure that the middle class takes for granted.
The programs that work—from ReMerge in Oklahoma City to the Nurse-Family Partnership to the Earned Income Tax Credit—share a common architecture. They invest in assets, not just income. They reward agency, not compliance. They build institutions around families rather than around bureaucracies. And they measure success by whether someone no longer needs the program, not by how many people the program serves.
The SEED Alliance proposes a policy platform for Oklahoma built on this architecture: empowerment beyond dependency.
There is a tradition of thinking about poverty that cuts across partisan lines—one that asks not “how do we maintain the poor?” but “how do we include the poor in the wealth-building structures everyone else uses?” This tradition has deep roots on both the right and the left, and its intellectual architects are some of the most original thinkers of the past half-century.
The Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto demonstrated in The Mystery of Capital (2000) that the world’s poor hold enormous assets—an estimated $9.3 trillion in untitled real estate alone—but in forms that cannot participate in the formal economy. A family may live in a house for generations without a deed. An entrepreneur may run a business without legal incorporation. De Soto called these “dead capital”—wealth that exists but cannot be leveraged.
This is not a foreign problem. In Oklahoma, Native American land fractionation—a legacy of the allotment era—has splintered ownership shares across generations until individual stakes are economically meaningless. Across the rural South, an estimated 1.6 million families hold “heirs’ property”—land passed down without clear title that cannot be used for mortgages, farm loans, or FEMA disaster aid.
In 1991, Washington University’s Michael Sherraden published the book that launched the asset-building movement. His core argument was elegant and damning: American welfare policy subsidizes the wealthy to save (through mortgage interest deductions, 401(k) tax benefits, and 529 plans) while penalizing the poor for saving (through means-testing that strips benefits from families who accumulate more than $1,000–$2,000 in assets).
Income feeds consumption. Assets change behavior, thinking, and orientation toward the future. Sherraden proposed Individual Development Accounts—matched savings accounts for the poor. The idea worked. Oklahoma was an early adopter, and Sherraden’s research evolved into the Children’s Savings Account movement, which Oklahoma helped pioneer through the SEED OK experiment in 2007.
Robert Woodson has spent four decades arguing that the solutions to poverty already exist inside poor communities—in the form of grassroots leaders, faith institutions, and neighborhood organizations. The obstacle is a “poverty industry” of professional service providers that intercepts resources meant for the poor. Woodson’s model identifies indigenous “neighborhood healers” and empowers them with training and capital. His Violence-Free Zone programs have reduced violent incidents by 50–70% in participating schools.
Woodson’s thesis carries particular force in Oklahoma. Tulsa’s Greenwood District—“Black Wall Street”—was a community that built extraordinary wealth and institutions from within, was destroyed by external violence in 1921, and then rebuilt through internal resilience. The Greenwood story is the empowerment tradition made visible in Oklahoma’s own history.
Ian Rowe, founder of Vertex Partnership Academies and author of Agency (2022), reframes the poverty debate around what he calls FREE: Family, Religion, Education, and Entrepreneurship. Rowe argues that young people are caught between two destructive narratives—“blame the system,” which strips agency, and “rugged individualism,” which denies real barriers. His third path: acknowledge structural challenges while equipping individuals with the mindset and institutional support to overcome them.
The most robust empirical finding in American social science may be the simplest. In 2009, Brookings Institution scholars Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill identified three norms—what they called the “Success Sequence”—that are near-perfectly correlated with avoiding poverty:
Subsequent research by W. Bradford Wilcox at the University of Virginia and Wendy Wang at the Institute for Family Studies, using National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data, found that among Millennials who followed all three steps in order, 97% avoided poverty and roughly 86% reached the middle class or higher. This held across racial lines: 96% of Black millennials who followed the sequence avoided poverty.
Among those who violated the sequence—particularly having children before marriage or stable employment—poverty rates ranged from 20 to 30 percent or higher.
| Sequence Status | Poverty Rate | Middle Class+ |
|---|---|---|
| All 3 steps, in order | ~3% | ~86% |
| 1–2 steps completed | ~15–20% | ~40–50% |
| None completed | ~50%+ | <20% |
Critics argue the Success Sequence conflates correlation with causation—that people who can follow these steps may already have advantages that independently predict success. The critique has merit. But Ian Rowe’s response is compelling: regardless of causation, this is information that young people deserve to have. Withholding it from low-income youth out of fear of “blaming the victim” is its own form of condescension.
The policy question is not whether to preach the Success Sequence. It is whether to build the institutional infrastructure that makes following it possible—quality schools, real employment pathways, marriage-supporting social norms, and economic foundations stable enough to build a family on. That is the SEED agenda.
Empowerment without structural reform is motivational speaking. The Success Sequence means nothing if the structures around a family are designed to trap it. Three barriers demand attention in Oklahoma.
Oklahoma is one of the most permissive states for payday lending. Effective annual percentage rates routinely reach 390–460% for a typical two-week loan. Payday lender storefronts outnumber McDonald’s and Starbucks locations combined in many communities. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has found that 80% of payday loans are rolled over or followed by another loan within 14 days. The average borrower takes out 8–10 loans per year and spends roughly five months in debt.
This is not a market—it is a debt trap engineered for profit. Colorado’s 2018 ballot measure capping payday loan APRs at 36% passed with 77% of the vote. South Dakota and Montana enacted similar caps by popular ballot with over 70% support. Oklahoma voters deserve the same choice.
The alternative already exists: Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) offer small-dollar loans at 18–36% APR with financial coaching and credit-building. Oklahoma has CDFIs operating in Tulsa, rural communities, and across Indian Country through the Oklahoma Native Assets Coalition. They are underscaled relative to the need.
In the 1950s, roughly 5% of American workers needed a government license. Today that figure approaches 30%. Oklahoma requires 1,500 hours of training for a cosmetology license—more than emergency medical technicians, more than law enforcement officers at many police academies. The Institute for Justice has documented dozens of licensed occupations in Oklahoma that pose minimal public safety risk but create real barriers for low-income workers: training costs, exam fees, time away from work, and criminal-record disqualifications that function as permanent employment bans.
This is a genuinely bipartisan issue. The Obama White House published a landmark 2015 report calling licensing a barrier to economic mobility. Arizona, under Republican Governor Doug Ducey, enacted the most sweeping licensing reform in the country in 2019. Oklahoma has made progress—HB 1373 in 2019 required licensing boards to assess criminal-record relevance—but the core burden remains.
Single-family zoning covers roughly 75% of residential land in most American cities, effectively banning the duplexes, triplexes, and accessory dwelling units that once provided affordable starter housing. Parking minimums add $30,000–$75,000 per unit to construction costs. Oregon, Montana, and California have enacted statewide reforms. Oklahoma City and Tulsa have not.
Oklahoma has a natural cost advantage—land is cheap. Modest zoning reform could produce outsized affordability gains: legalizing accessory dwelling units, eliminating parking minimums, reducing minimum lot sizes, and allowing missing-middle housing in residential zones.
Conservative thinkers have made three irreplaceable contributions to the anti-poverty conversation. Dismissing them because of their political origin is intellectually dishonest and practically destructive.
The Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector and AEI’s Michael Strain have documented extensively that employment is the single most powerful predictor of family stability, not because it generates income alone, but because it generates structure, dignity, and social connection. Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft makes the cultural argument: a society that devalues manual labor devalues the people who do it. The SEED Alliance’s Tekton Academies are built on this insight.
AEI’s Brad Wilcox and the Institute for Family Studies have produced the most rigorous research on the relationship between family structure and economic outcomes. The findings are consistent and uncomfortable for progressives: children raised by married parents fare better on virtually every measurable outcome—educational attainment, earnings, incarceration risk, mental health—even after controlling for income. This is not moralizing. It is data. Policy that ignores family structure is policy that ignores the most powerful social institution in human history.
Robert Woodson’s 1776 Unites initiative and AEI’s work on civil society institutions share a conviction: solutions imposed from outside communities fail; solutions that emerge from within communities endure. The policy implication is to fund indigenous leaders and organizations rather than national nonprofits parachuting in with standardized programs. Oklahoma’s strong faith-community infrastructure is an underutilized asset for this approach.
The Institute for Justice, the R Street Institute, and Americans for Prosperity have led the most effective campaigns to reduce the regulatory barriers that keep low-income workers locked out of legitimate employment. Their research demonstrates that licensing functions as an economic cartel—raising wages for incumbents by 10–15% while reducing employment by 17–27%. This work has produced real legislative victories in Arizona, Oklahoma, and dozens of other states.
Progressive thinkers and practitioners have built programs that produce extraordinary results. Dismissing them because of their political origin is equally dishonest.
Oklahoma incarcerates women at a higher rate than any other state—roughly 151 per 100,000 women, nearly three times the national average. ReMerge, a diversion program in Oklahoma County, takes mothers facing felony charges and offers them an alternative: 18–24 months of intensive case management, substance abuse treatment, trauma therapy, workforce development, and judicial accountability. Graduates show a recidivism rate of 5%, compared to the state average of 20% (ReMerge published data). Program cost: roughly $6,000–$8,000 per participant per year. Incarceration cost: $22,000–$25,000. Foster care cost avoided for each child kept with her mother: $25,000–$30,000 per year. ReMerge has kept an estimated 500 children connected to their mothers.
This is empowerment in its purest form. ReMerge does not simply release women. It equips them—with expectations, accountability, and tools.
Family & Children’s Services’ Women in Recovery program mirrors ReMerge’s results from the treatment side: 65–75% graduation rates, 5–10% recidivism among graduates, roughly 90% employment at completion. Together, these two programs give Oklahoma a nationally recognized model in each major metro—proof that the approach works across implementation styles.
The Community Action Project of Tulsa County pioneered what the Aspen Institute calls the “two-generation” model: children receive Head Start while their parents simultaneously receive healthcare career training. The insight is profound—if you only educate the child, the family stays poor; if you only train the parent, the child’s developmental window closes. Parents in CareerAdvance moved into healthcare careers with significantly higher wages than their pre-program employment. Their children showed improved school readiness. The Aspen Institute recognized CAP Tulsa as a flagship model for the national 2Gen framework.
David Olds’ Nurse-Family Partnership pairs first-time, low-income mothers with registered nurses from pregnancy through the child’s second birthday. Three randomized controlled trials spanning 30 years have produced results that are nearly unheard of in social science: 48% reduction in child abuse and neglect, 59% reduction in child arrests by age 15, 32 fewer months on welfare over 15 years, and a return of $2.88–$5.70 for every dollar invested. Oklahoma was an early adopting state and operates NFP programs across both urban and rural communities.
Economists Darrick Hamilton and William Darity Jr. have shown that wealth at birth is the strongest predictor of wealth in adulthood—stronger than education, income, or employment. Their proposal: a government-funded savings account for every newborn, scaled by family income, accessible at age 18 for education, homeownership, or business investment. Connecticut became the first state to implement Baby Bonds in 2021, providing $3,200 accounts to every baby born into Medicaid-eligible families. The mechanism is inherently an empowerment frame: it creates asset-holders, not benefit recipients.
The most powerful anti-poverty tools in America enjoy bipartisan support—or should. They reward work, build assets, and treat the poor as agents rather than cases.
The EITC is the single most effective anti-poverty program for working families in the United States. It lifts approximately 5.6 million people out of poverty annually, including roughly 3 million children. Created under Gerald Ford, expanded under Ronald Reagan, massively expanded under Bill Clinton, and preserved under every administration since. The reason it works: it is structurally conditioned on work. You cannot receive it without earned income. It is a wage supplement, not a welfare check.
Oklahoma enacted a state EITC in 2002 at 5% of the federal credit—one of the smallest in the nation. In 2016, the legislature made it non-refundable during a budget crisis, effectively gutting it for the poorest workers—the exact families it was designed to help. A single mother earning minimum wage with two children receives $0 in state EITC benefit. Restoring refundability would cost the state an estimated $30–$50 million annually while reaching over 300,000 working families. Thirty-one states have refundable state EITCs. Oklahoma should be among them.
Oklahoma has a legitimate claim to national leadership on CSAs. The SEED OK experiment, launched in 2007 by Michael Sherraden in partnership with the State of Oklahoma, was one of the first universal CSA experiments in the nation. The design was automatic enrollment—newborns received $1,000 Oklahoma 529 accounts at birth. Results: 100% participation (because accounts were opt-out, not opt-in), improved parental college expectations, stronger child social-emotional development, and reduced maternal depression. The most influential finding: the barrier to savings for the poor is not willingness but access and friction. Remove the friction, and families save.
In 2016, Oklahoma voters—in one of the most conservative states in America—passed State Questions 780 and 781 with 58% support. SQ 780 reclassified simple drug possession from a felony to a misdemeanor and raised the felony threshold for property crimes. SQ 781 required the state to redirect incarceration savings to county-level mental health and substance abuse treatment.
The policy worked: felony filings dropped, the prison population began declining for the first time in decades. But the implementation failed: the legislature repeatedly delayed or underfunded the 781 savings redirect. Counties that were supposed to receive treatment funding received little or nothing. Oklahoma decriminalized without funding the alternative—a cautionary tale about reform without institutional follow-through.
Year Up, the national workforce development program, produced one of the largest earnings impacts ever documented in a randomized controlled trial: graduates earned roughly 30% more than the control group. The model combines six months of technical training with six months of corporate internship, a weekly stipend to address opportunity cost, and high behavioral expectations. The SEED Alliance’s Ready, Set, Thrive initiative and Tekton Academies share this DNA—career pathways with rigor, accountability, and real employer connections.
| Program | Model | Key Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Earned Income Tax Credit | Refundable work-conditioned tax credit | 5.6M lifted from poverty annually |
| SEED OK / CSAs | Automatic savings accounts at birth | 100% participation; changed parental expectations |
| ReMerge / WIR | Diversion + accountability + services | 5% recidivism vs. 20% state average |
| Nurse-Family Partnership | Nurse home visits, pregnancy–age 2 | $2.88–$5.70 ROI per $1 invested |
| CAP Tulsa CareerAdvance | Two-generation (child + parent) | Significant parent earnings gains (Aspen 2Gen model) |
| Year Up | Training + corporate internship | 30% earnings premium (RCT) |
The evidence points toward a coherent platform—not a partisan wish list, but a set of policies that the best research from the right, the left, and the center all converge on. SEED proposes eight priorities for Oklahoma.
Make Oklahoma’s 5% state Earned Income Tax Credit refundable again. Cost: $30–$50 million annually. Reach: 300,000+ working families. This is the single highest-return, lowest-controversy anti-poverty action the state can take. Reagan championed it. Brookings endorses it. Heritage does not oppose it. Every dollar goes to people who are working.
Follow Colorado, South Dakota, and Montana in giving voters the chance to cap payday loan interest rates at 36% APR—the same cap Congress set for military families in 2006. Simultaneously, invest in scaling CDFIs as the fair-cost alternative. The Oklahoma Native Assets Coalition, Tulsa Economic Development Corporation, and Rural Enterprises of Oklahoma are ready to grow.
Build on SEED OK’s national pioneering research. Establish automatic 529 accounts for every Oklahoma newborn with progressive seed deposits. Oklahoma already proved the model works—it should be the first state to make it universal and permanent. Connecticut’s 2021 Baby Bonds legislation provides a template.
Oklahoma voters mandated that incarceration savings be redirected to mental health and substance abuse treatment. The legislature has not complied. Full funding of the 781 savings redirect would complete the reform voters already approved and provide the treatment infrastructure that decriminalization requires.
Oklahoma has two nationally recognized diversion programs producing extraordinary results in its two largest metros. Extend the model to Lawton, Norman, Enid, and other population centers. The cost per participant is roughly one-third the cost of incarceration—before counting the foster care savings.
Adopt Arizona’s universal license recognition model. Reduce cosmetology training requirements from 1,500 hours to a level proportional to actual public safety risk. Expand HB 1373’s criminal-record review to cover all licensing boards. Remove barriers that keep the poor from working legally.
Legalize accessory dwelling units in all residential zones. Eliminate parking minimums. Allow duplexes and triplexes in single-family zones following Oregon and Montana models. Reduce minimum lot sizes. Oklahoma’s cheap land means these modest reforms could produce outsized affordability gains.
Scale the Ready, Set, Thrive initiative’s career-connected learning high schools. Launch Tekton Academies for opportunity youth. Invest in two-generation programs modeled on CAP Tulsa’s CareerAdvance. Ensure every pathway includes real employer partnerships, not simulated “job readiness” exercises.
Every program in this paper—from the EITC to ReMerge to the Nurse-Family Partnership to Children’s Savings Accounts—shares a single operating principle that EMPath (Economic Mobility Pathways) in Boston has named explicitly: Mobility Mentoring.
The principle is this: poverty is not just a lack of money. It is a cognitive tax. Research by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir has shown that the stress of scarcity consumes mental bandwidth equivalent to losing 13 IQ points or a full night’s sleep. Traditional social services ask people in poverty to navigate complex bureaucracies, fill out forms, keep appointments, and make long-term plans—all executive-function tasks—while poverty is actively degrading their executive function.
The programs that work redesign the relationship around this reality. They do not ask “what do you need?” but “where do you want to be?” They do not measure service delivery but economic outcomes. They build the participant’s own decision-making capacity rather than creating dependency on the caseworker.
This is the thread that connects the right’s emphasis on agency with the left’s investment in support systems. It is not compassion or expectations. It is compassion and expectations. It is the recognition that the poor are not broken people who need management, but capable people who need the institutional infrastructure that the middle class inherited and the wealthy purchased.
Building that infrastructure—in Oklahoma, for Oklahomans, rooted in the family as the fundamental unit of society—is the work of the SEED Alliance.
The debate about poverty in America has been captured by its extremes—one side offering dependency without dignity, the other offering lectures without ladders. The evidence demands a third position: invest in the institutional infrastructure that empowers families to build their own prosperity, and hold those institutions accountable for whether families actually rise.
Oklahoma is not condemned to its statistics. It is home to programs that work, voters who chose reform, and communities that rebuild from within. What it lacks is a policy platform that connects these strengths into a coherent agenda. This paper is the beginning of that platform.
Damon Gardenhire
Architect, SEED Alliance
Founder, LINCHPIN
dgardenhire@linchpinresources.com
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