Maurice Liam Miller Biography

Maurice grew up in the San Francisco area, one of two children raised by a single parent - his mother, an immigrant from Mexico. The family was very poor - sometimes in crisis, other times stable - and his mother worked hard and gave tremendous effort to ensuring the security and viability of her family. However, when his sister was in her teens, she entered an abusive relationship and her life fell apart in subsequent years. Her children have been similarly challenged, due to poverty and addiction.

His mother pushed Maurice to pursue a college degree, and he ended up getting an engineering degree at UC-Berkeley. He wasn't terribly interested in engineering, but was amazed and puzzled to discover himself crossing into a completely different sphere of friends and influencers simply as a result of his education. He was again puzzled to see that the expectation shifted completely - from "no, you can't do this, you're poor," to "yes, success is expected, you have a college degree and anything is possible."   Maurice lost his mother by the time he was 20, which from his perspective was too high a price to pay.  He was a product engineer for only a short time after college. He became absorbed in how to solve the poverty problem. He took a job at a nascent organization, the Asian Neighborhood Development, and over about twenty years, grew it from 4 to over 100 staff. Its focus was youth development and job training in Oakland and San Francisco. He was lauded for his innovative approach, and invited by President Clinton to attend the State of the Union address in 1999. However, he had by then grown highly skeptical of the overall approach he was advancing.   He had learned a lot over the years, though, and had begun to formulate a new approach. In particular, his expectation of the working poor had shifted. Formerly, Maurice had felt that his mother's effort had been singularly heroic, and that his life path into the middle class was owing to her singular qualities and drive for a better life for her children. But as he delved, over many years, into poverty and how it operates in the context of families, he saw that many, many parents - single or raising children with their spouses or extended family support - apply the same drive, creativity, and tenacity. They want the best for their children and work very hard to get it. Their intention is not honored or enabled by the social structures or incentives currently in place.

He began to study the history of marginalized groups building community and generating economic growth - the African-American townships after slavery, the Cambodians building a donut empire in California, the Chinese - and saw that mutual support, coupled with access to some level of capital, spelled success for entire communities, over and over again.

Drawing on insights gleaned from his life and his work, Maurice started FII in 2001. He lives in Oakland, and has two children, one attending college the East Coast and another that recently graduated and is living as an Artist.

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