The Effects of Believing We Can Not Think for Ourselves

I saw a few days ago that Mayor Wharton launched a "Bank On Memphis" initiative. That's good and something that should have been done a long time ago. Yet as I read the statement, something struck me. "According to the Pew Research Center, there are between 30,000 and 50,000 people in Shelby County right now who do not use any kind of mainstream financial institution." We really needed the Pew Foundation to tell us this before somebody decided to do something? (Here's the whole statement)
There are organizations that have been working on financial services to low income areas for years, primarily The Rise Foundation. Your humble blogger made a map 4 years ago showing where banks were and weren't located in this city. (View here) There were people here in Memphis with the awareness and capability to start addressing this problem, yet because we don't believe that our own citizens are smart enough to grasp such complex issues, we wasted several years until some outside entity points out the obvious. How many other issues are we waiting for some DC/NY organization to mention us. I'll take suggestions in the comments.