This article reflects on the everyday experience of managing poverty in urban margins based on the empirical case of Cidade de Deus, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. There, I carried out an ethnographic study of the routine followed by the state agents who implement two social programs. How do agents bond with the young people who participated in the projects? How are the life trajectories of those who serve and those who are served involved in this endeavor? Are these everyday practices linked to a contemporary way of managing poverty and in what way? In a first section, I describe how these state agents who are "on the frontlines" of social programs build and carry out daily approximations to youngsters, by using two categories of analysis: common origin and exemplarity. In a second and articulated section, I analyze how social proximity between those who assist and those assisted is at the center of a contemporary form of poverty management.