What is Economic Empowerment?

What does it take to move out of poverty? Is it just about individual choices and conditions? How does access to quality education, good paying jobs, transportation, and housing impact self-sufficiency? What about those who are treated unfairly, how does that impact the ability to get ahead?  What policies increase upward mobility and what actually creates more income disparity?

Common Heart’s Bridges Out of Poverty based programs provide a framework for understanding poverty and helps professionals, churches, employers, and our volunteer allies understand what poverty is, how it affects us all, and what is necessary for an individual or family to rise out of poverty.

Our Economic Empowerment programs build on this framework and seek to address all causes of poverty – Habits and Conditions of Individuals, Human and Social Capital in the Community, Exploitation and the Political and Economic Systems – that create and maintain poverty.

  • Getting Ahead & Staying Ahead
  • Bridges Out of Poverty
  • Advocates for Change
  • Poverty Simulations