At a homeless shelter in Joplin, Mo., a wall by the coffee pot is decorated with food stamps cards. Residents who give up the government benefit add their cards to the wall, symbolizing the way of life they are leaving behind. Jocelyn Brisson, now the shelter director for Watered Gardens, grew up on food stamps and took part in the program from when she was 18 until she turned 50, sometimes trading her card for cash to buy drugs or cigarettes.

Back in the 1990s, photographer Chris Arnade worked as an analyst on Wall Street, and he would go on long walks to relieve his stress. The walks got longer and longer, to the point that he quit work and began documenting the stories of the people he met on his walks in New York’s downtrodden neighborhoods.

What precisely do the poor of Brazil and Bangladesh, or the reporters at The Milwaukee Journal who write about them—see my previous Saturday Series essay—need to be taught? I learned a lot at our Villars conference three decades ago, particularly from Udo Middelmann, president of the Francis A. Schaeffer Foundation. A number of understandings have remained with me all these years.

For more than 30 years I’ve read about and reported on the relation of worldviews to questions of international relief and development. American newspapers, hard hit by their loss of advertising to the internet, almost never do what The Milwaukee Journal did in the 1980s. It sent two reporters to Asia and Latin America to investigate problems of poverty. Working independently, each reporter came up with evidence pointing to five similar conclusions—and since we don’t see that kind of enterprise these days, I’ll report their findings.

In our last issue, we profiled five Hope Awards finalists that help people leave poverty. Please go to wng.org/compassion and vote for whichever of those local ministries moves you the most. But I regularly get letters asking about the big, national picture: Do we need to reform the U.S. welfare system, and if so, how?

Many years ago, I watched a TV show episode in which the main character, a weed-dealing widow, is trying to cross the border from Tijuana, Mexico, back to her Southern California town. She’s stuck in her car behind hundreds of other cars waiting to pass the San Ysidro Port of Entry, the largest land border crossing between San Diego and Tijuana. It’s a sweltering hot afternoon, so she calls out to one of the street vendors and buys an iced latte. Bad idea.

When Paul Ryan gave his farewell address as speaker of the House on Dec. 19, he called on future lawmakers to make poverty issues a greater priority. Ryan’s mentor on poverty-fighting, Bob Woodson, age 81, sat in the front row. While politicians have come and gone, Woodson has toiled on the front lines since the 1970s as the godfather of neighborhood-based organizations that help people help themselves. Here are edited excerpts of our conversation in Washington, D.C.