With the ongoing success of blogging and other such social websites, CNN is rushing to elevate citizen journalism with what they call I-Report.

One question posed to viewers/readers caught my eye:

“Nearly one billion people worldwide live on less than a dollar a day, and of the 2.2 billion children in the world, one billion of them live in poverty. Here’s our question for CNN.com users: If you had $10 million to give away, what would you do with it to help break the poverty trap? Send us your thoughts.”

Here is my response.

We’d first have to define which kind of poverty we could impact - America’s version of poverty whereas people struggle to make a decent wage and eating 3 square meals is a luxury or the World’s version of poverty whereas people live in disease-infested shacks, struggling everyday to physically survive and eating scraps is a luxury.

Then we’d have to consider that with a mere $0.01 per person we are only going to be able to impact an infinitesimal number and only for a short period of time.

Not discounting sociology, history and human psychology, we’d then have to ponder if we are naïve enough to believe we can rid society of poverty or recognize that it is an immovable mountain and instead focus on the ‘poverty shift’.

If we were to limit our view to an American perspective, we’d have to rationalize that our society relishes the ‘American Dream’ and we honor and admire those that achieve social status and wealth. Social sciences and simple economics tell us that this shift in abundance has to come at someone’s expense. We only have to look at game theory and the “Prisoner’s Dilemma” to see this in play. We only have to look as far as gambling institutions or state-sponsored lotteries to see that 80% or more of the lucky winner’s purse comes from people who struggle to make ends meet, yet because those people find hope and inspiration in the lottery process, 1 person or a small group of people get to rise up at a time.

So, if I had $10M and had proceeded along the logic described above, I would create a business that teaches people to rise up and take those around them to new heights and we’d call it LifeMAPP. We would teach people that you cannot eliminate a poverty gap in a democratic society, but you can change which side of the bridge you are on.  How?  Check it out tomorrow in Part II. ;)