Recognizing the Challenges Low-Income Families Face Every Day
The Rockefeller Foundation is the leading funder of Opportunity NYC, which recognizes the day-to-day challenges faced by low-income people: The mother who must choose between taking her child to a doctor or showing up at work so she can pay the monthly bills. Or the eighteen-year-old who is faced with the tough choice of finishing school or quitting to get a job.
Opportunity NYC aims to change the economics of this kind of decision making. The program provides payment to low-income families and individuals to increase participation in three targeted activities—education, health and employment—to maximize their chances of breaking the inter-generational cycle of poverty. By offsetting the costs of choosing education, training and preventative health care, we are encouraging choices that invest in families’ futures.
Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs)
As a global foundation, we are funding poverty-fighting models that work in different contexts around the world.
Conditional Cash Transfers (CCTs) are a relatively new but increasingly popular tool in the field of international development. CCTs are designed to decrease the factors that contribute to poverty by promoting greater investments in human capital.
CCT programs originated in the late 1990s in Mexico with the creation of a program called Progresa (now Oportunidades), which serves more than 20 million Mexican families, and has been replicated in more than 20 countries. Progresa and other CCT programs have been subject to rigorous evaluation, which has documented reductions in the incidence and severity of poverty and malnutrition, as well as improvements in school enrollment and completion.
Three Model CCT Projects
Opportunity NYC consists of three separate demonstration projects:
- A family-focused CCT, called Opportunity NYC Family Rewards, which includes workforce, education and health components, and serves 2,550 families (with an additional 2,550 families participating in a control group that does not receive any services);
- An adult-focused CCT, exclusively designed to improve workforce participation, reaching 2,400 families; and
- A child-focused CCT, designed to boost test scores among 4th- and 7th-grade students, reaching 8,600 students.
Groundbreaking Innovation is Unique in New York City
The New York City pilot is unprecedented in three important ways:
- First, this is the first CCT program to be tried in United States or Western Europe—as such, it represents an unparalleled attempt to test a successful anti-poverty program from the Global South in the Global North.
- Second, the New York City experiment is the first program to include a significant workforce participation component in addition to the traditional health and education components.
- Third, Opportunity NYC is being piloted in the largest urban center in the United States, while the majority of CCT beneficiaries in the Global South are located in rural areas.
Background on the Funding and Implementation
The Foundation has played a leading role in funding the design, implementation and evaluation of the Opportunity NYC program, which is being financed wholly through private sources in its pilot phase. The CCT program was launched in September 2007 and by mid-December, the first incentive payments to families in the pilot program were made. In 2009, the pilot program was extended from two to three years. (Complete first-year findings are expected to be released at the end of 2009.)
The design and evaluation of the program will be managed by the social science research firm MDRC. Implementation is being led by Seedco, a nonprofit intermediary organization specializing in workforce and community economic development, in conjunction with a network of community-based organizations.
As a result of the success of this first program, the Foundation has funded another: the Conditional Cash Transfer Learning Network.
Read the PDF press release for further information about the Rockefeller Foundation's New York City Opportunity NYC.
Read the transcript of a speech on the launch of Opportunity NYC by President of Rockefeller Foundation, Judith Rodin.