Poverty is not being able to protect your family. Poverty is not being able to save your children when mothers with more money could. And because the strongest instinct of a mother is to protect her children, poverty is the most disempowering force on earth.

On our drive out, Molly explained to me that the empathy barrier stymies all efforts in development.

What do I mean by a “delivery system”? Getting tools to people who need them in ways that encourage people to use them—that is a delivery system.

It follows that if you want to attack poverty and if you want to empower women, you can do both with one approach: Help mothers protect their children.

They believed that many newborn deaths could be prevented with practices that cost little or nothing and could be done by the community: immediate breastfeeding, keeping the baby warm, cutting the cord with sterilized tools.

Encourage your friends (women and men) to seek out organizations doing excellent work on women’s empowerment. Discuss the findings, and choose one or more of these organizations to support with your time and money.

If you want to speak out with your spending, make a list of businesses where you spend money and use Gender Fair to check their records on women. See if they have competitors who do a better job on gender, and then support the brands and businesses that support women, writing letters to the winners and losers and telling them why you’re changing.

That’s what it means to be poor. They’re on the margins. They’re not getting the benefit of what human beings know how to do for each other. So we have to invent a way of getting it to them.

In Journey of the Heart, an extraordinary book on relationships, John Welwood points out what he calls “a natural balancing process” between partners. He writes: “Anything that one partner ignores, the other will feel a greater need to emphasize. Whatever quality of being I deny, such as power, softness or playfulness, my partner will find herself