When Jason Janz moved into Five Points a decade and a half ago, he hadn’t planned to dedicate his life to helping families get out of generational poverty. But then he got to know Tiffany Johnson.

“This all happened out of a relationship with our literal next-door neighbor, Tiffany,” Janz told me.

Janz could tell Johnson was a go-getter, but she felt like she wasn’t really getting anywhere.

“At the time I had been at Walmart for 10 years, making $15 an hour, no promotions,” Johnson said in a recent video interview for the Daniels Fund. “I was doing for myself, and it wasn’t working.”

Janz could relate. He had spent his childhood and adolescence in poverty in Green Bay, Wis.

“All I knew was poverty as a kid,” he said at a meeting of the Colorado Business Roundtable recently. His father had lost his business, and consequently moved his family of seven to Denver for a fresh start.

Janz became a pastor after college and worked in a church in the western suburbs of Denver, determined to help those who had grown up poor like he had. But he soon felt like the church had limited direct impact on his neighborhood. He wanted to make a bigger difference, and that’s when he and his wife and four boys moved into Five Points.

“That’s when we fell in love with our neighbor,” Janz said. “We wanted to do a deep walk with the poor in our own lives,” he added, “to save our own souls, I guess you could say. And Tiffany began to be our teacher.”

“I saw she was bright and had a management mindset,” Janz said, but was stuck changing oil at Walmart.

“Everything I thought about poverty alleviation began to flip upside down,” during his conversations with Johnson, “realizing that turkey dinners, backpacks, bikes and Christmas gifts were not going to change the game. We needed to do deep development and provide assets and opportunity.”

In other words, Janz began to think like a businessman about poverty.

One day, Janz asked Johnson, “What if I can increase your income by 50%?”

“I was like, legally?” Johnson asked.

Janz had come to believe that to truly move people out of generational poverty, nonprofits can’t just do gifts, wage growth and jobs, they must do wealth building, “because the metric of justice is wealth.”

Some families have lived multiple generations in poverty, Janz told me, where nobody in the family had access to go to college, and nobody had access to habits of success. Many people who come from generational poverty cycle back into it in three to five years — even if they do get out of it temporarily.

So out of those conversations with Johnson, the nonprofit CrossPurpose was born “as a way to lovingly walk people from generational poverty to generational wealth.”

Johnson became the first student.

In the last decade and a half, CrossPurpose has developed a four-step program based on the old Chinese proverb that if you give a man a fish, he eats for a day; teach a man to fish, and he eats for a lifetime.

“But that only gets you halfway up the mountain,’ Janz says. “You have to equip them with a good pole, and we also need to teach them to own the pond.”

So “give a fish,” the relief step, is only the first step of the program.

During the second step, enrollees engage in a personal development curriculum where they work on essential “soft skills” like conflict resolution, communication, resume building and more.

They start there because Janz and his wife believe poverty is often more than just a lack of money. Poverty can be a poverty of good relationships. It can be caused by traumatic experiences that leave people wounded, or an environment of hopelessness that pervades communities. It can be the result of racial and economic oppression or a simple lack of exposure to enough opportunities.

“Our heart is to abolish economic, relational or spiritual poverty,” Jen Janz, Jason’s wife and program director, said in that Daniels video.

After the initial six weeks of personal development and relationship-building, leaders move on to step three, educational courses in over a dozen career tracks, including health care, sales, transportation, culinary arts, clerical and administrative, and information technology. 

Then CrossPurpose places its students with Denver companies, which is the fourth step, marking their graduation.

The secret to the program’s success seems to be a no-holds-barred commitment to helping folks navigate a transition out of poverty over three to five years, rather than just giving them a handout or a job. It’s sticking with someone until the need is met instead of drive-by charity.  

Johnson, Student Zero, spent two years working with CrossPurpose, “just trying to get out of poverty.”

She went on to become an executive of a printing company. She became the first Black woman to run a FedEx store in the state of Colorado. And now she’s making six figures.

“I came in, didn’t know what success was like,” she said. “Now here I am, well over 50% of that income, purchased a home, and I would have never in a million years thought something like that was tangible.”

When it started in 2012, CrossPurpose made a promise to 19 families to help them get out of poverty — no matter what it took. A dozen years later, they enrolled 500 families in the program and graduated their 1,000th graduate.

Last week, CrossPurpose won a prestigious award from the Daniels Fund as one of the most successful do-gooders in the West, earning a $100,000 grant. The other two winners were Teaching the Autism Community the Trades and Natrona County Child Development Center in Wyoming.

Ironically, Janz sees Colorado businesses as much more important than nonprofits like his in helping people get out of poverty.

Businesses “are the No. 1 solution in our community to stop generational poverty and create generational wealth,” he said.

“What if we actually invested in our employees the way all of us do with our loved ones?” Janz asked at that business roundtable. “What if we saw every single person that was in our company and we said, ‘we’re going to do whatever it takes to create wealth in your life.’”

What if businesses all made wealth building their business?

Janz made the point that Black Americans in 1865 owned 0.5% of the nation’s wealth and 100 years later, they own 1.5%.

Johnson, for one, is determined to change all that.

“When you’re out of this program, and you’re gaining these new skills, and now you have this financial literacy piece in your pocket, now guess who I’m teaching that to? My daughters. So now they’re changing the way they see money.”

“This is more than just a program. It’s a community. It’s life-changing,” Johnson said.

Now Johnson is on the CrossPurpose board. This means that the fortuitous relationship that started 15 years ago on a front porch in Five Points has changed, as well.

Now, technically, Johnson is Janz’s boss.