Robert L. Woodson, civil rights activist, community leader, and noted conservative author, died peacefully Wednesday at the age of 89. Woodson spent more than six decades challenging the poverty industry he believed exploited the very communities it claimed to serve. In 1981, he founded the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise in Washington — later renamed the Woodson Center.

“Bob Woodson was more than the founder of an organization,” the Woodson Center’s statement reads. “He was a visionary and civil rights leader whose life transformed countless communities from the inside out. For more than six decades, his life’s work rested on a single, unwavering conviction: that the people closest to a problem are best positioned to solve it. That conviction shaped an entirely different way of understanding poverty, community, and the latent power of the people.”