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

Chapter 1: Introduction

Chapter 1 Introduction “ I f you work, you should not be poor.” This is the implicit social contract in America. Work is a fundamental value in the United States, and hard work should bring rewards. Until recently, it generally did. As the prosperity of the country grew in the years after World War II, so did the fortunes of most of its people. In the last twenty-five years, however, the earnings of low-skilled workers have fallen further behind. It is no longer true that a rising tide lifts all boats. The working poor are disproportionately minorities and women, particularly single mothers. Many lack the necessary resources to juggle the responsibilities of earning a living and giving their children the love and supervision they need. People at all income levels find it difficult to balance family and work, but the challenges are all the more daunting for those employed in low-wage jobs with few if any benefits. Many move from one job to another, work irregular hours, and take on a second or third job, yet find themselves taking home a paycheck that leaves them in poverty. In the last twenty years, as awareness of working poverty has begun to permeate our political consciousness, policy makers have begun to search for solutions. In this book, we tell the story of one promising effort called The New Hope Project, an experimental program that lasted three years. New Hope was created by a dedicated and visionary group of community activists and business leaders in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who believed that work should be the best route out of poverty. New Hope was not a welfare program, but a social contract. Its founders understood the basic inadequacies of the low-wage labor market and forged a set of work supports for full-time workers—both parents and nonparents, men and women—that would lift them out of poverty as well as provide essential benefits in the form of health insurance and child-care subsidies for people who needed them. A decade later, there is clear evidence that New Hope reduced poverty and promoted the school achievement and development of children of working, low-income parents. We know this because the program was HIGHER GROUND subjected to a careful evaluation. The names of people who applied for New Hope were put in a lottery; half were accepted into the program and the other half became a comparison group. We go beyond the statistical reports and surveys to tell the stories of some of the people who participated in New Hope—what their families were like and what happened to them and their children during and after the three-year New Hope program. In these individual stories, we learn about the complicated circumstances in which adults attempt to sustain a balance of work, family, and individual needs and, more important , which supports help them achieve that balance. Our research offers some of the strongest evidence to date that work supports make a difference in the lives of people in the low-wage labor market. None of us—the founders of New Hope, the participants, or the researchers—are under the illusion that work supports can solve all the problems in the larger economy or all the individual difficulties that can impede adults’ efforts to support themselves. Overall, however, we conclude that the policies tested in New Hope offer the United States a positive and feasible model to achieve the goal of the American social contract that work should pay while allowing low-income adults to sustain a reasonable balance between work and family. AN IDEA TAKES ROOT The story of New Hope begins in the late summer of 1979, when a group of social activists gathered at a retreat in the mountains of eastern Pennsylvania to hammer out the final details of an organization to push for large-scale changes in employment laws, policies, and programs. Called the Congress for a Working America (CWA), the organization’s stated purpose was, according to Julie Kerksick, one of the key participants, “to create the right and opportunity for a decent and productive job for every American who wanted to work.” Kerksick, her husband John Gardner , and many others in the group were labor organizers who thought of themselves as outsider activists pressing for change. They had joined forces with leaders from the “inside,” including David Riemer, a policy expert with state and national government experience. Almost ten years later, in Milwaukee, the organizers had scaled back...