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| Ranking |
Evidence-Based Practice |
| Description |
Opportunity NYC includes three separate demonstration projects that help poor families avoid long-term poverty: Family Rewards, Work Rewards, and Spark. Each project involves linking temporary cash payments (called cash transfers) to actions and achievements. It is currently being tested in six districts in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Manhattan, NY that house predominantly impoverished Black and Latino residents.
The Family Rewards program is the most comprehensive of the three Opportunity programs and involves educational, workforce, and health components. The program builds on the concept of mutual responsibility. Families are only awarded monetary payments if they meet certain conditions such as improved performance on standardized tests, parental engagement in their children’s education, participation in preventative health visits, and sustaining full-time employment or education.
The program’s three objectives are: (1) to lessen immediate income-related hardships for poor families, (2) to help and encourage poor families to increase or sustain positive efforts to improve their own futures, and (3) to help poor families as they invest in their children’s futures.
Support for this program is provided by numerous foundations and private funders. |
| Goal / Mission |
The goal of this program was to help poor families build up their “human capital” and avoid long-term poverty. |
| Results / Accomplishments |
MDRC is currently conducting a randomized control trial evaluation involving approximately 4,800 families and 11,000 children to assess short and long-term impacts of the program. Findings from program’s early operating period suggest that Family Rewards program made a significant impact poverty and hardship, including hunger and some housing and health care hardships. In addition, the program increased participant’s savings and the likelihood that parents would have bank accounts, and reduced the use of alternative banking institutions. In addition, the program slightly increased families’ continuous use of health insurance coverage, reduced their use of hospital emergency rooms for routine care, and increased their receipt of medical and dental care. |
| Categories |
Economy / Poverty
Economy / Investment & Personal Finance
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| Organization(s) |
Mayor Bloomberg’s Center for Economic Opportunity |
| Source |
MDRC |
| Date of Publication |
Mar 2010 |
| Date of Implementation |
2007 |
| Geographic Type |
Urban |
| Location |
City: New York City |
| Primary Contact |
James Riccio
MDRC
19th Floor
16 East 34 Street
New York, NY 10016-4326
(212) 532-3200
publications@mdrc.org
http://www.nyc.gov/html/ceo/html/programs/oppor...
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| For more details |
http://www.mdrc.org/publications/549/overview.html
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| Target Audience |
Families |
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