The hidden problem with America’s safety net | Erine Gray

I love that it's sort of born out of practical experience of you, and frankly, seeing a public policy challenge.

Is there sort of a market innovation solution that can help address this challenge that you're seeing? I guess one of the things I've thought about a lot is this idea of, the way our social safety net is currently structured, there are some perspectives that, well, we just need to help people navigate the system in a better way, or that, well, we need to fundamentally restructure the system.

There's people in both camps, there's crossover, I tend to kind of agree with both.

What is your sense of, I guess, why did you go to, well, sort of the navigation side, helping people better understand the safety net system that they might be participating in and helping them navigate it more easily.

Why did that seem to be a pressing area that you thought needed some fixes that led to FindHelp?

It's a good question.

I'll take you back a little bit in time.

After my experience with my mom's illness, I decided I wanted to go to graduate school.

I actually went to the LBJ School of Public Policy in Austin.

And, you know, for me as a kid, I benefited from the safety net.

So my mom and dad during hard times, I was born in in a housing project.

My first house after the first place they took me home to was the projects in a small town in western New York.

Eventually, they saved up and got a mortgage and got a house.

I've seen what it's like, especially in rural America, where there's not a lot of wealthy people there, but the rich and the poor are the difference between those that can pay their bills every month versus those that can't.

And so I was interested in the safety net.

And but in graduate school, you know, sort of seeing what Johnson tried to do and he knew it was broken.

He he said, you know, I'll fix it late.

We'll fix it later.

But, you know, he's good at getting bills through.

And but I took a class from a professor in the journalism school named Dr. Marvin Alasky, and he wrote The Tragedy of American Compassion that came out in the 90s.

And that book changed my life.

He was curious what happened when there wasn't a government safety net.

And I've since gotten to know him, reconnected with him a few years ago after 20 years when I was in graduate school.

And what was exciting about Alasky is, There's no doubt that the Great Society changed things and affected poverty and affected a lot of positive things.

But what he pointed out was there's an effect that occurred, and that is, would a neighbor be less likely to help their neighbor when there wasn't a government safety net? And so looking through history books and going to Library of Congress, he looked at what happened and he found minutes from a town council meeting, I think in the 1600s.