Did you hear what Ben Carson said the other day about poverty? You can bet the folks at United Way of Butler County heard him.

You remember Dr. Carson, the surgeon-turned-politician who ran for president in 2016. The guy who eventually won, Donald Trump, put Carson on his Cabinet as secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

Carson said in a radio interview last week that he’s not discouraged by the prospect of more than $6 billion in HUD budget cuts for low-income assistance next year.

Carson — who himself grew up in poverty to become a widely acclaimed neurosurgeon — said people with the “right mind-set” can have everything taken away from them, and they’ll pull themselves up. He believes the converse is true as well: “You take somebody with the wrong mind-set, you can give them everything in the world (and) they’ll work their way right back down to the bottom.”

The language was a little different, but the sentiment resonated with a report in last week’s Butler Eagle about changes being made at the United Way of Butler County.

Sherry Sholes, director of finance for the United Way of Butler County, said, “It is very important for any nonprofit to remain viable to the community it serves. Simply acting as a pass-through doesn’t do the work that our board and staff want to do. ... The direction is now more in making a difference in the community than simply raising money.”

Is Sholes referring to a different mind-set? Consider the new objective, called “30 by 30.” The name refers to a target of reducing by 30 percent the number of county individuals and families living below the self-sufficiency standard by the year 2030.

By inference, the simple introduction of this goal shatters a presumptive mind-set that the number can’t change. It establishes a new paradigm: It can, it will and it must change.

Sholes and Carson are using different terminology to say essentially the same thing — namely, that throwing money at symptoms of poverty does not cure the root causes of poverty.

It’s very difficult to predict the trend of social services financing. We’ve witnessed phenomenal growth in government funding and corporate grants giving rise to human service organizations like Center for Community Resources — not considered a rival of United Way, although CCR commands a growing share of dollars and other assets traditionally pledged to United Way and its member agencies.

Let’s concede that it’s hard accept the United Way’s explanation that it’s abandoning a dollar goal for its annual campaign — as a nation of competitors, we like to keep score — and extending the campaign to year-round status. It’s difficult to forsake the traditional measures of a successful campaign. Other recent examples — GoFundMe campaigns online, the Thon dance at Penn State and nightly 50/50 drawings at professional sporting events among them — show the stimulative effect a dollar goal and deadline have on a fund-raising campaign.

The 30 by 30 goal is noble and farsighted, but it may be too distant and too abstract to persuade contributors to support it. The United Way and its member agencies will need to rally around a clear vision of where it wants to go. It also must present an easy-to-understand measure of progress that is more incremental than 13 years from now.

The agency’s future is imperative, particularly in the face of the massive cuts in federal spending for low-income families. The only way to successfully reduce low-income spending is to pull massive numbers of people out of low-income status.

Let’s not casually dismiss Carson’s observation, or his comment about overcoming a poverty mind-set. An avowed Christian, Carson knows that the first of Jesus’ eight beatitudes, or supreme blessings, is “Blessed are the poor in spirit; theirs is the kingdom of Heaven.”