Draft: ALICE, The Pandemic & Hope:

The Social Entrepreneur vs The Grinch, A Heartwarming Story for Xmas.

I must thank local reporter Margie Manning for indirectly introducing me to ALICE, an acronym that means, Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed, which one must admit, is a mouthful. It seems to imply “working poor”, but poor seems to mean that one is stuck in a state of poverty. Having experienced poverty myself as a homeless person on the Streets of Chicago over a decade ago in the winter time (just before Xmas of 2005), I must say that my dire situation was anything but fun. I went through a period of what I call EFD, an acronym I coined, which means “Extreme Financial Duress”.

It is a blessing that MacKenzie Scott Bezos, a writer and former cofounder of Amazon has decided to turn her attention to the plight of ALICE and the impoverished people in our community, who yearn for a better life.

In my own case, I have had my own ups and downs, but as a friend of mine told me, “You have always had a CEO mindset” and my dear sister, Aruna Sundarrajan, one of the top leading women in the IT & Technology space in India told me once, “You are the most resilient person I have ever met”, I feel that my own experience could be very valuable for developing roadmaps, technology and processes for elevating the status of indigent community which is characterized by ALICE and the cycle of poverty, especially in Black neighborhoods known as the Inner City, not just in US, but across the Globe. (To be contd)