The Bridges Out of Poverty model is a comprehensive, solution-focused approach to understanding and addressing poverty. It emphasizes the collective need for individual, organizational, and systemic change. Bridges offers concrete tools and strategies for individuals, organizations, and communities to work together toward poverty reduction.

The Bridges model offers a series of workshops for professionals, organizations, and businesses that work with families experiencing instability in our communities.

The full-day Bridges Individual Lens workshop provides a deeper understanding of how individuals, think, act, behave, and prioritize based on the demands of their environment, learned behaviors, driving forces, and access to essential resources that support stability. Participants unveil a mutual understanding and language, and they discover innovative new strategies that improve client/customer relations, engagement, and outcomes.

Participants in the Bridges Institutional Lens workshop will review and apply the Bridges Institutional Lens to their programs, services, policies, and procedures. They will learn how to enhance the workplace culture, improve collaboration, and achieve performance targets.

Once people have applied the learning at the individual level to enhance their self-awareness and rapport with others and have made organizational improvements by using the Bridges lens, they are then ready for genuine collaboration. At this stage, all sectors are involved—private, nonprofit, businesses, employees, service providers, service recipients, boards, and decision-makers. This collaborative effort addresses community issues and influences policy changes by using an innovative problem-solving thinking tool.

The Bridges framework can and will stabilize individuals, the organizations that serve them, and the communities we all live in.

Here is a more detailed look at what makes Bridges Out of Poverty unique:

  • Socioeconomic lens: Bridges uses an economic class lens to understand how we all think, behave, and prioritize differently based upon a social cognitive learning theory.
  • Inclusive approach: Bridges addresses poverty at multiple levels, including individual, organizational, and community, thus promoting a holistic and inclusive approach to community wellbeing.
  • New tools and strategies: Bridges provides practical tools and strategies for understanding and addressing poverty and empowering individuals and communities to come together and work collaboratively by using a person-centered coaching approach.
  • Focus on relationships: Bridges Out of Poverty emphasizes the importance of building positive relationships between individuals from diverse backgrounds and fostering understanding and empathy for one another’s unique values and strengths.
  • Community involvement: Bridges Out of Poverty empowers community involvement, recognizing that everyone has a role to play in addressing poverty.

For more information about hosting a Bridges Out of Poverty workshop, call (800) 424-9484 or email Lynn Jackson at [email protected].