Merging of Knowledge

The Merging of Knowledge is like what happens when two streams merge into a river: "They can never again be separated. Each stream is mixed with the other, and both rush forward more powerful than before."

— Moraene Roberts, 1953-2020, ATD Fourth World Activist in London

Merging of Knowledge is a set of values and a methodology. With Merging of Knowledge, teachers, social workers, business leaders, policy makers, and others engage in dialogue with people facing social exclusion and extreme poverty to come to a collective understanding of poverty and build holistic solutions.

Merging of Knowledge overcomes differences in speaking, thinking, life experience, and perspectives and allows for constructive exchanges. By creating an environment of respect, trust, and patience founded on the understanding that inclusive processes lead to transformational change, Merging of Knowledge is able to bridge gaps between different walks of life. 

People living in poverty are often isolated, ashamed, and not recognized as valuable contributors to society. The Merging of Knowledge methodology uses a peer dynamic that first validates the knowledge of a group of people with lived experience of poverty by building a collective knowledge from their individual experience. This knowledge is then brought into dialogue and ultimately merged with the knowledge of academic and social professional peer groups.

Merging of Knowledge shifts the traditional approach to anti-poverty work by including people with experience of poverty from the very beginning: in framing the questions, gathering ideas and data, and producing analyses and solutions with others, as equals. This way of building knowledge is highly inclusive and not extractive. The resulting knowledge belongs to all participants equally and empowers them all.

The impacts of this methodology, created and adopted by ATD Fourth World members, have been profound. In an article here, Donna Haig Friedman, Senior Research Fellow and Former Director of the Center for Social Policy of UMass Boston, shares her twenty years of experience on collective efforts to impact the root causes of poverty using Merging of Knowledge.

To learn more about how to create the conditions necessary for this approach, read ATD Fourth World’s Guidelines for Merging of Knowledge and contact us to organize a training session with your school or organization.

Read more about Merging of Knowledge and how it’s used: