What is the ESR Center?

Poverty is a word that conveys a lot of different meanings to different people. Some see hunger, others see disease, while others see squalor. These mental pictures often come from the media's publication of dire cases of starvation and cataclysm. Yet there is another, often more insidious side to poverty. It is the fact that it exists just around the corner, and that we choose not to see it. This is why as a worldwide community we respond more to disaster than the daily, grinding catastrophe that is poverty.

For instance, here in Utah where the ESR Center is located, almost ten percent (225,000 people) live in poverty. In the United States, almost thirteen-percent (37 million) live in poverty, while over forty percent (2.7 billion) of our brothers and sisters around the world live in poverty. For millennia the same questions have been asked, "What causes poverty? What can be done? How can I help in a way that builds self-reliance?"

Economic Self-Reliance

The BYU Center for Economic Self-Reliance (ESR Center) was founded in 2003 with the express purpose of answering those questions by focusing on helping families become economically self-reliant. As an academic research center, we do this by helping socially minded practitioners to better serve their clients. Our research agenda investigates and develops interventions that best promote economic self-reliance—both domestically and abroad.

What is the ESR Center?

Understanding, Innovation, and Delivery

The ESR Center focuses on understanding economic self-reliance better, coming up with innovative ways to facilitate it, and ensuring that it can be delivered in an effective way.

An analogy is often helpful to understand who we are and what we do. Almost everyone is familiar with cancer because it has touched most families' lives. For a cancer patient and their family a cancer research center is a bastion of hope—even though most cancer patients will never be treated in one. The ESR Center is similar to a Cancer Research Center. Take a look inside, and this is what you'll find.

	What is their purpose?	To cure and vanquish cancer
	What do they do?	They create new, innovative remedies for cancer treatment/cure as well as preventative measures for keeping cancer at bay.
	How do they accomplish this?	They bring a small set of three important constituents together focusing on applied research: Researchers (faculty, post-doctorate fellows, graduate students, students, non-academic researchers etc.) Practitioners (doctors, nurses, clinics, etc.) Sponsors
	What is the end product	The innovative solution—which must be both effective and practical—is spread to other cancer practitioners, researchers, and sponsors outside of the small 'core' set.
	How do they know that they are successful?	Three important ways: Cancer practitioners adopt the new innovation Cancer researchers corroborate the findings and build on them Sponsors recognize the cancer center's innovations by providing additional resources

Replace 'cancer' with 'poverty and improvidence' and you have the ESR Center. We call our effort to cure and vanquish poverty and improvidence Economic Self-Reliance. We search for long-term answers to the question of self-reliance by joining with a similar network of collaborating researchers, practitioners, and sponsors who are interested in lasting, pertinent, and effective solutions that lead to self-reliance.

The ESR Center has two major initiatives in place today. The first, the MicroFranchise Development Initiative, is focused on helping hundreds of millions of families in the developing world. The second, the Single Mom Initiative, is focused on helping thousands of single moms and their children in Utah.

What is the ESR Center?

MicroFranchise Development Initiative

Microfranchising is a model we are researching and piloting to provide better business opportunities and services to the poor by scaling down many of the franchising concepts found in some of the most successful companies in the world. This method of distribution has the potential to create revenue for both the franchisee and franchisor.

The MFDI examines and develops plans for small businesses (start-up costs of $300-$2,000) that can be easily replicated throughout developing economies. The overall objective of microfranchising is to provide entrepreneurs in developing countries with sound business models and operations manuals that alleviate the creative entrepreneurial requirements of starting one’s own microbusiness.

Single Mom Initiative

Talk to many human-service providers in the United States and they will mention that single moms and their children are a large percentage of the clients they serve–often times the largest constituent. Issues and hurdles that face new and existing single moms can be daunting. Often the assistance offered is contradictory or doesn't recognize the entire needs of the single-mom family.

Like the ESR Center's MicroFranchise Development Initiative, the new Single Mom Initiative brings innovative researchers, practitioners, and sponsors together to conduct ongoing research to better understand the demographics of single moms and the challenges that they face as they strive to become self-reliant. This network becomes a virtual think tank that helps practitioners serving single moms to provide better programs and services and also to help advocates and government entities identify the laws and programs that offer the greatest potential in helping the single mom and her children.