For all of my adult life I have seen povertyas the ugly and preventable sore that harms our neighbors down the street or across the ocean. I have worked in all manner of groups to fight poverty. Poverty is not natural, at least not for the past 100 years or so.

The Benefit Bank, the Work Supports Initiative and all of the efforts of SfP, try to build on a vision of a world where the idea that each person has value is not rhetoric, but practice. I don't know how long it takes to make a just world, but I do know that it doesn't happen without our efforts.

SfP is a tool=maker to let neighbors help neighbors and perfect strangers. We have created a company to build those tools. I have the privilege to pose the hardest, my colleagues might say outrageous, challenges to a group of more than 50 electronic machine tool makers who build the thing, solve the problems and offer the services to help us challenge poverty, inequality and exclusion.

It is exhausting, but the real secret is that for me it is the best job I can imagine.