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This chapter explores the Mobilization for Youth (MFY), a social program aimed to assist Puerto Rican and African American male youths in achieving upward mobility and full inclusion in American society. MFY was conducted in the Lower East Side, a neighborhood inhabited by successive waves of poor immigrants during the 1940s through the 1970s. Lloyd Ohlin and Richard Cloward conceptualized MFY as a top-down, expert intervention program aimed at low-income Puerto Rican and African American male youths and focused on remedial education and job training. It helped secure decent housing and quality education, inspiring social workers to develop a new model of client advocacy.

This chapter focuses on the translation of deprivation into practical intervention programs targeting children from low-income African American homes. It notes that these programs explicitly attempted to counter the perceived sensory deprivation caused by the “impoverished environment” of poor black homes as well as maternal deprivation attributed to inadequate mothers. It evaluates compensatory education programs developed in the early 1960s and then turns to Mobilization for Youth, a community action program active in the early and mid–1960s on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

This chapter demonstrates how MFY helped generate and influence the development of the legal services, welfare rights, and Black Arts movements in the US. Foremost was the way the research staff, Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, encouraged a range of grassroots activity, including the proactive canvassing of individuals and families eligible for benefits. In conjunction to the contribution of the two, Lyndon Johnson's administration took many of MFY's innovations and included them in the 1964 Economic Opportunity Act, particularly the employment of paraprofessionals—neighborhood residents who did not have formal education but who were valued for their experiential knowledge—as well as the concept of maximum feasible participation: the idea that poor people themselves should be involved in decision making in antipoverty programs.

Chapter 2 tells the story of liberal programs designed to try and reduce poverty in the inner cities. This includes both federal programs and private programs, often supported by federal funding. The focus is on the sociological theory behind many of these programs, which justified themselves on having a fresh new approach to the problem of poverty. Key figures included Leonard Cottrell and Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin. Cloward and Ohlin in particular worked on one of the most celebrated antipoverty programs, Mobilization for Youth in New York City. However, the chapter also unpacks how these programs and theories reflected the assumption that poor people were dysfunctional and had to be taught how to participate in their own local democracies, laying the groundwork for the idea of a culture of poverty.