Salina ? About 40 people gathered Thursday in a conference room at the Salina Area Technical College to hear Robert Woodson Sr. — a prominent conservative voice on the subject of welfare reform — talk about creative methods local leaders can use to combat poverty and crime in their neighborhoods.

What he had to say may have surprised many in the audience.

Robert Woodson, Sr., speaks to a group of community leaders in Salina about creating new ways to combat poverty in low-income, high-crime neighborhoods. Woodson, a noted conservative writer, is the president and founder of the Washington-based Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, which was hired by the Department of Children and Families to lead a series of faith-based community summits on poverty.

“I believe that what we’re getting out of both the left and right, and the center, isn’t working,” Woodson said, addressing the group via video conference.

“People on the left believe our commitment to the poor depends on how much we spend, not how wisely we spend it. And so people on the right conclude that since what we have done over 50 years hasn’t worked, all we need to do is cut the budgets and then put stringent requirements on poor people to discourage dependency,” he said.

Woodson, 78, is the president and founder of the Washington-based Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, an organization that provides training and support for community and faith-based organizations to address issues such as child poverty, crime and neighborhood decay.

The Kansas Department for Children and Families hired Woodson’s firm this year on a one-year contract for about $300,000 to conduct a series of two-day training sessions around the state, working with local governments, churches, schools and community organizations in different parts of the state.

In his youth, Woodson said, he was a liberal activist in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and a strong supporter of the “Great Society” anti-poverty programs begun under President Lyndon Johnson. Over the years, though, he grew disillusioned with those programs, and he became more conservative, and even spent four years as a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank.

In 1981, he founded the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise.

Woodson’s message Thursday was more about economics than religion, saying the social service industry needs to think like entrepreneurs.

“The reason that the word ‘enterprise’ is in our name is because we believe principles in market economy apply to our social economy,” Woodson said. “Most innovation occurs at the smallest unit. It’s in the hearts and minds of individuals. It’s not at universities where academics sit and design solutions. It was all in the hearts and minds of individuals.”

Woodson said his team has developed individualized projects in communities across the country, from helping residents of a high-crime public housing complex in St. Louis take over management of the complex, to identifying the leaders of warring gangs in Washington, D.C., and training them to become neighborhood and community leaders.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge,” he said. “We just lack new creative thinking when it comes to helping poor people. It’s not about economic incentives — it’s how can we more intelligently invest in remedies that work.”

The remainder of the conference was conducted by staff at the center who led participants through a series of exercises to identify critical issues in their communities and to brainstorm strategies for addressing them. The event in Salina also included participants from Hays, Great Bend and Pawnee County.

It’s an initiative of the department’s Faith Based and Community Initiatives. But while Woodson occasionally drew references from the Bible to make his point, his basic message was more economic than religious.

At times, Woodson’s message seemed out of sync with that of Gov. Sam Brownback’s administration, which has put a high priority on incentivizing traditional marriage as a means of combating childhood poverty.

In 2012, DCF began publishing an annual State of the Family Report, which tracks education, employment and “family” data at both the statewide and county level to come up with an index to measure “family wellbeing.”

Among the family-related trends it tracks are divorce rates, numbers of single-parent households and numbers of out-of-wedlock births.

Jared Anderson, a Kansas State University professor who is part of the team that compiles the report, said that “on average,” children from two-parent families fare better than those raised by single parents, but he cautioned against interpreting that too strictly.

“There are a lot of kids from single-parent households who do fantastic, and there are other kids in married households who don’t do well at all because because those households are troubled,” he said. “But on average, yes. Children do better with two parents because of resources, time, attention, emotional availability — a lot of things.”

Woodson also said he considers it “paternalistic” for the state to focus on keeping marriages intact and said more attention should be focused on finding solutions to the social and economic problems that sometimes result when marriages do break up.

“Ideally, a man and a woman should be raising a child,” Woodson said in a separate phone interview. “But absent that, the alternative is for that mom to pick up her life. Poverty doesn’t have to be a life sentence just because you started off wrong.”

“I market solutions,” he said. “I don’t think we can spend a lot of time talking about the causes. The question is, what is the solution?”

That approach seemed fine with those attending, most of whom had volunteered for the project in hopes of finding specific solutions to the unique needs of their communities.

Deb Marseline, of Salina, who volunteers with a local nonprofit group called Circles of the Heartland, said one of the biggest issues facing her community involves job training and housing.

“I think one of the things that we see as big challenges here is that manufacturers are talking about finding the skilled workers to do the jobs,” she said. “And I think one of the challenges we have is finding affordable housing for workers that earn a manufacturing salary could live in.”

Ken Loos, who works at the High Plains Mental Health Center in Hays, said there are unique challenges in northwest Kansas, a sparsely populated region of small towns and large wheat farms.

“A lot of our clients earn $10,000 or less annually as an income,” he said.

More than anything else, Loos said, he came to the summit to make connections and share ideas with people from other communities facing similar problems.

“I think what I’m taking out of it is ‘community empowerment.’ We always think about how local government governs best. Well, an offshoot of that, then, is local communities recognizing problems and concerns they have and identifying some of the existing resources they have that can have an impact.”