Higher Ground: New Hope for the Working Poor and Their Children

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments Most books are long in the making and this one is no exception. It began for the three of us in 1995 when we were members of the MacArthur Foundation’s Research Network on Successful Pathways through Middle Childhood. Few foundations have been as willing as MacArthur to make open-ended investments in such a diverse group of researchers and provide the time and seed funding for innovative research. Our collaborations and the design and new directions of this work would not have happened without the Research Network. The network’s success owes much to its visionary leader, Jacquelynne Eccles. Robert Granger, then at MDRC and now president of the W. T. Grant Foundation, offered the Research Network the opportunity to extend the MDRC evaluation of New Hope to include its effects on children and families. He would have been a fourth author had he had the time. Many other network members contributed at various stages to the New Hope project, including James Johnson, Cynthia Garcia Coll, and, especially, Vonnie McLoyd. The core New Hope evaluation, focused on income and employment, was supported by a diverse group of funders and skillfully conducted by MDRC. In addition to Robert Granger, Tom Brock, Fred Doolittle, Johannes Bos, Cynthia Miller, and Carolyn Eldred were particularly instrumental in MDRC’s evaluation of the program. The Child and Family Study was supported by the MacArthur Foundation , the W. T. Grant Foundation, and the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (R01 HD 36038) and used the core services of the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin (5 R24 HD042849). The ethnographic fieldwork data management and analyses used core services of the UCLA Qualitative Fieldwork Core, funded by the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (5 P30 HD004612, Eli Lieber, codirector). Duncan’s efforts in writing the book were generously supported by the Russell Sage Foundation, which hosts a visiting scholars program. Duncan’s year there provided an ideal setting for working on the book. Huston is grateful to the University of Texas at Austin for the Dean’s Fellow research leave granted her. Weisner thanks the Center for Culture and Health at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior for research support. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many of the remarkable individuals involved in developing and running New Hope were generous and patient in providing their accounts of its history and correcting our initial attempts to put the story of New Hope on paper. We relied most heavily on Julie Kerksick, David Riemer, and Tom Schrader, but we are also thankful for the time that Sharon Schulz, Don Sykes, and Robert Haveman gave to us. Tom Brock of MDRC provided valuable insights into the implementation of New Hope and the links between the evaluation team and the New Hope program. Weisner led our effort to understand how New Hope affected its participating families by collecting qualitative and ethnographic data from New Hope and control group families. The terrific fieldwork team that visited the New Hope ethnographic-sample families between 1998 and 2004 included Conerly Casey, Amy Claessens, Mimi Engel, Victor Espinosa , Christina Gibson-Davis, Eboni Howard, Katherine Magnuson, Andrea Robles, Jennifer Romich, and Devarati Syam. Lucinda Bernheimer supervised their efforts and participated in data analysis. Edward Lowe provided outstanding supervision for the fieldwork of 2003 and 2004 and helped analyze the data collected. Claudia Solari also provided data analyses and valuable assistance in preparing qualitative data for this book. Helen Davis worked on the qualitative data on fathers and partners. At UCLA, Karen Quintiliani, Faye Carter, Sonya Geis, and Allison Tom-Yunger all provided research assistance for the qualitative team. Hiro Yoshikawa and Edward Lowe, with Weisner, also led a parallel study of New Hope work pathways, the contexts of work and family life, and impacts on children of variations in work pathways. This edited book, Making It Work: Low-Wage Employment, Family Life, and Child Development (also published by the Russell Sage Foundation), complements our book, also uses the New Hope data, and includes contributions from many chapter authors. Many individuals participated in designing, collecting, analyzing, and writing scientific reports about the quantitative data. Westat, under Alexa Fraser’s supervision, collected the data for the assessment conducted two years after random assignment. Survey Research Management, led by Linda Kuhn, collected the five- and eight-year follow-ups. The talented team that designed the child and family measures, led by Aletha Huston at the University of Texas at Austin...