According to a study by the Economic Mobility Project of the Pew Charitable Trust, many people make more money than their parents did, but they are not better off socially or economically. One-third of American households, constituting 100 million people, earn under $35,000 a year. For those in the lowest income levels, economic mobility has been lost, and generation after generation stays tied to the same economic class.

This “stickiness” of class calls into question our deepest democratic values that hold that if you work hard, you can do well. But the “solution” for those in the lowest income communities isn’t about working hard–they already do. It’s about working together.

Through my work with the Family Independence Initiative, I know that families have a remarkable ability to support one another in their rise from poverty. We’ve seen this through our country’s history, and if we want to truly re-establish economic mobility then we need to go back to our roots, when we depended on families and believed in their collective ability to create something out of nothing.

Take, for example, the townships built by African-Americans before and after slavery. Together they bought land, pooled resources, started and supported each other’s businesses and therefore strengthened their community as a whole. We’ve seen similar examples in so many other communities like the Irish, Italians, Chinese, Mexicans, and Cambodians.

Yet, our understanding of the power of families working together has diminished over time as we’ve become primarily focused on individual successes vs. the power of mutuality. And we’ve shifted from believing that working poor people are hard-working and capable to assuming that their lack of success is because they are lazy or helpless. We’ve seemingly written off 100 million indigent people as incompetent and incapable of offering constructive solutions for their own plight, and that someone else (policymakers, government, philanthropists, etc.) must do so on their behalf.

A one-size-fits-all strategy to end poverty isn’t the answer, just as it isn’t the answer for other economic groups in America. Every family has its own solutions and requires access to a variety of flexible resources to realize their self-determined path.

America has gone to great lengths to make resources available for middle class and wealthy people to grow and maintain their wealth–low-interest loans, tax credits on assets like mortgage interest deductions, and matches to retirement savings. But the same hasn’t been true of America’s lowest class. There’s no reason we can’t create resources for low-income folks so they can leverage their capacity and move themselves forward. American families can indeed pull themselves up, so long as they work together and the flexibility is there to make it happen.

We are underestimating the capacity, wisdom, and talent of those in poverty to participate in their own advancement to our own detriment. Imagine if that capacity and resourcefulness was really recognized? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we assumed that people would work together to lead their own change?

The Family Independence Initiative has been testing that approach for more than a decade, and the perception that low-income families are simply lazy or helpless is simply not based in fact. Take Sinita, Bertha, and Jobana who live in San Francisco with their husbands and have 12 kids among their three families. Their child care options are limited, given the cost, and earning extra income is a challenge. A few months after joining FII, the three friends launched a business. Through their community, they have found clients with homes and small offices that need cleaning. While two of the moms clean, the third cares for the kids. And they split the profits.

There are Sinitas, Berthas, and Jobanas all over America, and what holds them together is the power to create their own path to economic mobility by tapping into their creativity and their desire to create a better future for their families.  Not a silver bullet program or resource, but a flexibility to chart their own course.

By working together, people can do a tremendous amount to move themselves forward. If we want to help low-income communities and re-build a thriving middle class we need to invest resources in the initiative that people are taking to move themselves forward.

The challenges faced by families in poverty are great.  But if we can approach the conversation on economic mobility through a new lens—that all families, regardless of income level, need access to flexible resources to chart their own upward mobility–then I believe we will create lasting change.

Mauricio Lim Miller is the founder of the Family Independence Initiative, and a guest on last Sunday’s “MHP” poverty special (see above). Find FII on Twitter and Facebook.

Obama asked how old the students were and quizzed some of the kids on basic math. After the students answered a few addition questions, one student hesitated on a subtraction problem. “Subtraction is tougher than addition,” Obama said.

The president was in Baltimore to give a speech about job creation. He visited Ellicott Dredges, a manufacturing plant that makes equipment used for infrastructure projects, telling workers, “You might not know it if you were just watching the news, and you’re exposed to all the partisan battles and brinksmanship in Washington, but the truth is there are a lot of reasons to be optimistic about where this country is headed.”

The Florida teenager who was arrested two weeks ago for causing a small explosion on the campus of her high school will not be charged with a crime. Kiera Wilmot, 16, was arrested by police in Bartow, Florida, after conducting an unauthorized science experiment which lightly damaged an eight ounce plastic water bottle.

At the time, Wilmot faced possible charges for “possessing or discharging weapons or firearms at a school sponsored event or on school property.” If she had been convicted, she could have faced up to five years in prison.

Wilmot’s arrest became a national story, as members of the press and the scientific community insisted that Wilmot was the victim of a massive overreaction from law enforcement. A crowdfunded legal defense fund netted over $8,000 to cover Wilmot’s potential legal fees, and a Change.org petition to get the charges dropped received nearly 200,000 signatures.

“Even though I don’t have the privilege of knowing Kiera, I believe we all have the responsibility to stand up with one another whenever there is injustice and felt I had to do whatever I could to make sure the unjust felony charges were dropped,” said Maggie Gilman, the creator of the petition, in a statement circulated by Change.org. “I’m very thankful to the 195,000 people who stood with Kiera and signed the petition on Change.org!”

Wilmot has already served a ten-day suspension, and is now attending another high school, according to her attorney. Per the terms under which she avoided criminal charges, Wilmot will also have to complete a diversion program outlined by the state’s Department of Juvenile Justice. The terms of the diversion plan are not public, and it remains unclear whether Wilmot’s arrest will be expunged from her record.

As recently as Monday, it seemed like things would go differently. That was when school district officials announced that, due to a crippling budget shortfall, school would not return for the remainder of the semester. Students were instead supposed to have the option of attending a voluntary “skills enhancement camp” over the summer.

“I am pleased to see that the State of Michigan will release state aid payments to the Buena Vista School District,” said Rep. Dan Kildee, D-Mich., in a statement. “This is certainly a promising development and it is my hope that the kids and teachers will immediately return to their classrooms and finish their school year.”

Buena Vista’s budget deficit was caused in part by $40,000 in aid which the district mistakenly received and now must return. The state government also withheld three months worth of normally scheduled aid because, the Department of Education said, Buena Vista officials had failed to submit a satisfactory deficit elimination plan (DEP). Progressive organizations and politicians had been calling on Republican Gov. Rick Snyder to release emergency funds to the district, but he demurred.

Tuesday night, the local school board approved a DEP which State Superintendent Mike Flanagan said was up to the state government’s standards.

“The skills camp always was a back-up plan,” Flanagan said in a statement. “Our first priority was to re-open the traditional classroom programs, but if the local school board hadn’t adopted an approvable DEP, we wanted to still find ways to provide instruction to the students. That back-up plan won’t be needed now.”

Buena Vista schools may open their doors again as soon as Friday. However, it remains unclear what their financial situation will be in the following school year, or whether other Michigan school districts could find themselves in a similar position. A recent report [PDF] from the state Department of Education said as many as 49 school districts are running budget deficits, some of them “insurmountable.”

In the meantime, Michigan schools superintendent Mike Flanagan said that he will work with the district to come up with a satisfactory deficit reduction plan so that its schools can reopen in the fall. Whether all of Buena Vista’s schools will return in their present form remains unclear, but one thing is certain: their troubles are not unique.

Over the weekend, Flanagan announced that the Pontiac School District had narrowly avoided missing its next payroll, thanks to the release of state funds to the district. Republican Governor Rick Snyder’s administration has withheld three months’ worth of financial aid for Buena Vista because that district has not submitted a legally required deficit reduction plan to the state.

While not every one of the state’s local school districts is in immediate danger of missing payroll, many of them are running deficits. In February 2013, the state Department of Education reported that as many as 49 school districts were running budget deficits, while an additional three districts were projected to soon join them.

“The magnitude of some of these deficits seems almost insurmountable,” wrote Deputy Superintendent Carol Wolenberg in the department’s report [PDF].

Cash-strapped school districts face limited options. Pontiac’s school district was only able to delay a Buena Vista-style shutdown in part because its umbrella school district—Oakland Intermediate Schools, which oversees local school districts in Oakland County—provided cash advances. Though the district remains operational for now, it is unclear whether it will be able to hit its deficit reduction targets and remain open for the foreseeable future.

Buena Vista school district has had no such luck. Last week, Superintendent Deborah Harvil told MSNBC.com that the district would “probably request an Emergency Manager,” or a financial review process which could end in Emergency Management. Under Michigan state law, the state government has the power to declare financial emergencies in debt-ridden school districts and municipalities, empowering an Emergency Manager (EM) to take control from local officials.

To avoid Emergency Management—which has often ended in privatization of public goods, mass layoffs, and significant wage cuts for public employees—some Michigan residents are calling on Governor Snyder to release emergency funds from the state’s $500 million rainy day stash. Snyder has dismissed these calls. Though Buena Vista’s deficit is only $1 million, the governor ruled out alleviating it with rainy day funds on Thursday.

“That’s not what the rainy day fund’s really intended for,” he said. “I think people are trying to look through good, constructive solutions that wouldn’t require that.”

“If this isn’t a financial emergency, then what is?” Progress Michigan’s Josh Pugh said to MSNBC.com.

On the question of whether an Emergency Manager might be necessary, Snyder was less direct.

“I wouldn’t come to that conclusion right away, because in fact there’s a whole process to make that determination,” he said.

The graduate school competition for education start-ups awards $150,000 to education entrepreneurs who are changing the game for public schools.

“We started the business plan competition to address the issue of how can we support entrepreneurs from a research based University,” said Bobbi Kurshan, U-Penn’s executive director of Academic Innovation and the leader of the Milken-Penn Competition, on The Cycle Thursday. “What we were looking for in the 10 finalists were companies that had three attributes: One, they were going to make a difference. Two, they could be scaled up, and three, they were addressing a problem that needed to be solved in education, that technology could help them solve. Autism Expressed fit all of those categories.”

Autism Expressed, one of this year’s four winners, “fit all of those categories,” Kurshan said.

The company is dedicated to helping autistic students work at their own pace and provide them with marketable digital skills.

While many people are able to learn and understand the digital world through our everyday lives, whether that be communicating with friends and family or at our jobs, that might not always be the case for autistic students, explained Michele McKeone, founder of Autism Expressed, on The Cycle.

“So we create a highly synthesized system that teaches those skills incrementally,” she said.

By winning this competition Autism Expressed hopes to “mobilize this large and growing population,” McKeone added. “The graduate school of education provides so many supportive services and winning this competition is going to allow us to now scale out our products so we can begin to serve families and get our product into the hands of those who really need it the most.”

Not only is our education poor, but we’re systematically driving away employers through onerous regulations. The result: a poverty rate of 15% in 2011, with 46.2 million people in poverty, according to Census data. We’re failing our young people by not giving them skills to earn well-paying jobs. We fail them in school, and we fail them in their post-secondary education.

The 19^th century French reformer Jules Ferry described schools as a “social elevator” that made the nation better off. The most effective way to raise people out of poverty is to give them an education, yet children are generally required to attend neighborhood schools, some of which are failing. Some parents can move to a home with a better school, or send their children to private schools. Poor children can’t opt out.

President Obama understands this. Rather than send his children to their local D.C. school, they attend Sidwell Friends, where the tuition is over $30,000 annually. In Chicago, the Obama girls went to private school. But in his first term, the president tried to end funding for Washington D.C.’s Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provided scholarships to 1,600 low-income students to attend schools of their choice in the 2011-12 school year.

SNAP benefit recipients can choose their grocery stores and their groceries; Medicaid recipients can visit any doctor who accepts the program; and those who qualify for housing vouchers can live wherever they find housing openings. But parents can’t choose their schools—and they should be told to do so, with the help of school stamps. Catholic schools, operated at a fraction of the cost of many public schools, had graduation rates of 99% in 2011, and 85% of graduates went on to college. (Full disclosure: I’m not Catholic.)

All parents should be able to choose their children’s schools. Requiring schools to compete for students—just as grocery stores compete for customers—raises their standards. After students graduate, they should be encouraged to take a serious look at community colleges. They can graduate practically debt-free in two years with a credential or associate degree in a high-return field, such as computer software or health services (nursing, occupational therapy, physical therapy). Jobs in these fields pay almost median income.

At the same time as improving America’s education, policymakers need to make it easier for firms to hire workers.

Minimum wages prevent low-skilled workers from getting their foot on the first rung of the career ladder. Rather than discussing raising it from $7.25 to $9.00 an hour, why not get rid of it altogether? An hourly minimum wage of $7.25 means the cost to the employer, with Social Security, unemployment insurance, and workers’ compensation, is closer to $8.00. Those with skills worth less than $8.00 won’t be employed and stuck in poverty. About 95% of hourly workers are already paid above the federal minimum wage, even though they could legally be paid less, because that’s the wage that stops employees from working for others.

The Affordable Care Act, with its $2,000-per-worker penalty for not providing the right kind of health insurance, is another disincentive for anything but the smallest businesses to hire. For higher-skill workers, the $2,000 penalty will be subtracted from cash wages. But low wage workers won’t get hired, or will only get part-time work.

The penalty begins at 50 workers, so an employer can hire 49 workers without a penalty. Any more than that can cost $40,000 a year in penalties. In a sad twist, firms can avoid penalties if they hire part-time workers, defined as fewer than 30 hours per week. In April, another 278,000 workers were on part-time hours even though they wanted full-time work.

The economic solutions to reducing poverty are simple. But the politics of implementing these solutions appear overwhelming, helping the poor to stay poor.

Diana Furchtgott-Roth is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, and a guest on Sunday’s “MHP” focusing on solutions to American poverty. Tune in at 10 a.m. EST on MSNBC.

Joining the show will be Rev. Vivian Nixon, Executive Director of College and Community Fellowship and co-founder of the Education Inside Out Coalition. Rev. Nixon focuses her work on the importance of access to education in order to end the cycle of poverty. Through the EIOC, Rev. Nixon targets the obstacles those in prison face when it comes obtaining higher education. The EIOC works to change polices that do not allow incarcerated individuals to receive Pell Grants.

We will also be joined by Jeremy Rosen, Executive Director of the National Policy and Advocacy Council on Homelessness. Mr. Rosen’s work has focused on affordable housing policy on the federal, state and local levels including veterans housing, housing for children, youth and families as well as the issue of homelessness.

Dr. Mariana Chilton will be in Nerdland to discuss her solutions for ending child hunger in America. As an Associate Professor at Drexel University’s School of Public Health, Co-Principal Investigator of Children’s Healthwatch and Director of the Center for Hunger-Free Communities at Drexel, Dr. Chilton works to improve the overall health of our nation’s children from pediatric care to policy to making strides in ending childhood hunger.

Founder, President, and CEO of Family Independence Initiative Maurcio Lim Miller will share his strategy to reverse poverty by harnessing the strength and initiative of low-income families in order to deliver results that our current system does not deliver.

Tianna Gaines-Turner will talk firsthand about living in poverty and working to feed not just herself, but her family. As a member of Witnesses to Hunger, Tianna works with hunger experts and those who have experienced hunger to find solutions and advocate for those in need.

Be sure to read what we’ve linked above, and watch Melissa Harris-Perry Sunday at 10 a.m. EST on MSNBC! Also, don’t forget to join us on Facebook and Twitter with the hashtag #Nerdland.

Questions like these plagued social worker Megan Kashner for years. “We have systems that prepare people for jobs and no funding in the social safety net to get them over short term hurdles,” Kasher said in an interview with MSNBC.com “I thought, ‘This problem had been ticking me off for 20 years, maybe the technology is finally there to do something about it.’”

When Kashner founded the non-profit Benevolent in Chicago in 2011, she’d spent more than 20 years working in the non-profit sector in cities like Washington D.C. and New York. During that time, Kashner watched countless disadvantaged families stumble over problems that would barely register to members of the middle class.

Kashner and her staff decided to use a crowd-funding model reminiscent of Kickstarter, but Benevolent aims to do more than just raise money. “Rather than have people speak about or on behalf of people, we are using crowd-funding as one of a series of tools that allows low-income people to tell their stories,” said Kashner. The tools Kashner put together create a new way of fostering community engagement and expanding the social safety net.  A recent grant from the Knight Foundation’s Tech for Engagement initiative will allow Benevolent to expand from Chicago to Charlotte, NC, and Silicon Valley, and additional contributions from Fisher Family will fund a Detroit program. Under budget pressure, cities and states are gutting social programs, leaving low-income Americans with fewer and fewer avenues to meet their often urgent needs.

According to 2011 US Census data, some 46 million people live in poverty. The number has risen drastically since the financial crash, and because it defines poverty as a family of four living on less than $23,021 a year, millions more Americans face serious financial challenges every day.

Benevolent defines “low-income” as living on less than 200% of the poverty line, which would mean a family of four subsisting on less than $46,000 year.  People like Robert Williams. Williams, a single father, started a job training program through Chicago’s Jane Addams Resource Corporation to become a welder while he worked a dead end job and worried about how to get winter clothes for his daughter. He has used the site twice to get through tough times, first to get his daughter new clothes and then to buy prescription safety glasses. Before getting the funding, Williams had tried drugstore reading glasses, but they weren’t strong enough for him to see the detail he needed to weld properly.

“I just did my 90-day review and was rated as an exceptional employee,” Williams said. “I wouldn’t have been able to get what I needed and I would have been struggling. It was a godsend.”

Benevolent learned through trial and error to keep funding goals relatively modest; the program started with a maximum request of $1,800, but the staff discovered that number seemed too daunting for donors, whose average contribution is $50. Benevolent has since lowered its cap to $700 and has raised more than $45,000 to fund over 80 requests.

While Kashner says most requests fall into four groups–assistance to get or keep a job, secondary medical expenses, computers, and “bridge needs” like furniture or clothing.  Julie’s case is one that is harder to categorize; her page on the site is asking for money to pay for gas and a hotel so she can take her grandchildren to visit their mother in prison. As she wrote on the site, “my goal is to make sure that when my daughter is released later this year that she is still connected to and has relationships with her family and loved ones.”

Damian Thorman, Director of National Programs for the Knight Foundation was impressed by the networks that Kashner and Benevolent had created in such a short time. “We want to use tech to engage citizens in solving challenges in communities and to build social capital. Neighbors help neighbors and end up creating a bond.”

The personal connection created through the stories and small donations also allows both donors and recipients to rethink what it means to contribute to and receive what could be considered charity. “In the beginning, we wondered if our clients would feel weird putting up videos, but it’s a reminder to them that they’re working hard,” Alex Niemczewksi, an employment coach with the Jane Addams Research Corporation said. The process has helped her clients appreciate exactly how hard they’ve been working in the face of incredible obstacles. “Once people begin to tell their stories, I haven’t had a client worry about getting ‘charity money.’”

“Social networking” has become a modern buzzword for nearly every industry, but personalization strengthens the bonds formed between donors and clients. It also challenges assumptions about who deserves help. “It could help change the conversation around giving money,” said Niemczewski. “Some are hesitant to start because they don’t know who ‘deserves’ the money, but that’s not the way to think about people affected by intergenerational poverty.”

For the Knight Foundation’s Thorman, expanding programs like Benevolent are the future of community-building. “This is weaving the social fabric that allows people to more deeply engage” with one another, Thorman said. As more people like Williams, the welder, find work that pays well and moves them out of poverty, there will be more avenues to help future generations striving for financial security.

“People are going to be called to help each other more and more,” says Thorman, “and with tools that help communities solve their own problems, the stronger and more resilient our communities are going to be.”

This week we saw the end to unthinkable horror when Cleveland women Michelle Knight, Gina DeJesus, and Amanda Berry, and Berry’s six year-old daughter were finally freed from the house in which they were held captive in for more than a decade. The story brought back memories of Jaycee Dugard and Elizabeth Smart, who–like Knight, DeJesus, and Berry–experienced physical, psychological and sexual abuse at the hands of a captor. On Saturday’s Melissa Harris-Perry, the host will discuss the issues of teens, sex and safety–and the notion that sexual exploitation does not exist only in the stories that dominate the news cycle.

In particular, Harris-Perry will discuss the dangers of a Republican-backed bill in the North Carolina House that will further bar teenagers from accessing necessary healthcare. The bill proposes that minors must present notarized consent from a parent or guardian before receiving treatment for STDs, pregnancy, substance abuse, and mental illness. She will also address the Obama administration’s recent opposition to lifting the age restriction on over the counter emergency contraception.

Contrary to the rescue we saw in Cleveland this week, we also witnessed the arrest of Air Force Lt. Col. Jeffrey Krusinski for sexual battery, the same guy who was leading the U.S. Air Force’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office. In addition, a new Pentagon report showed a dramatic rise in unwanted sexual contact reports amongst active-duty military. (That report and ones from years past can be found here; check them out.) Harris-Perry will be joined by Anu Bhagwati, the co-founder and Executive Director of the Servicewoman’s Action Network, Rep. Jackie Speier, Rolling Stone contributing editor Sabrina Rubin Erdely, and others to address the growing epidemic of sexual assault in the military. Make sure to read Rubin Erdely’s February report, “The Rape of Petty Officer Blumer,” before the show. (Trigger warning for you survivors and loved ones out there.)

In our second hour, #Nerdland is excited to welcome House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. Leader Pelosi and our host will discuss all things from immigration reform, this week’s Benghazi hearings to the possibility of the first female president, gun control, and the upcoming midterm elections.

Our show wraps up back in North Carolina with a discussion on the NAACP rally that took place on Monday. (See the incredible speech delivered by Rev. William Barber above.) Activists who have dubbed these rallies “Moral Mondays” gathered to protest new proposals to restrict voting. Dozens were arrested, including a group that calls themselves “the Raging Grannies.”

Be sure to read what we’ve linked above, and watch Melissa Harris-Perry Saturday at 10 a.m. EST on MSNBC! Also, don’t forget to join us on Facebook and Twitter with the hashtag #nerdland.