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Letter from the President
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When I became President of MDRC in 2004, I assumed the leadership of a remarkable
organization with which I have had the privilege to be associated for many years — first
as a public funder, supporting MDRC’s studies and using its lessons to design public policy;
then as a private foundation funder, seeking to test new approaches to solving social
problems; then as a public administrator, using MDRC’s findings to overhaul a big-city
welfare system; and finally as a member of MDRC’s senior management team and the
founding executive director of MDRC’s sister organization in Canada.
From these varied perspectives, I have observed both the persistent nature of some of the
nation’s most pressing social problems and the special role that MDRC has played in
advancing our understanding of what does and what does not work to solve those problems.
When the organization was created in 1974, on the heels of the “Great Society,” the
prevailing mood was one of skepticism and realism. Today, following the economy of the
“roaring Nineties” — when federal and state expenditures on social programs also rose
significantly — the skepticism and realism are back, with the nation once again facing a
looming budget deficit. As in the early Seventies, policymakers face difficult choices, ones
that will shape the nation’s social compact for years to come. Such periods of retrenchment
place a premium on reliable evidence that can answer the question that MDRC was
founded to address: What actually works to improve the well-being of disadvantaged families,
children, and individuals?
Fortunately, more reliable evidence is available today than ever before, particularly in relation
to the interrelated problems of poverty and dependency, areas in which MDRC’s work
has played a leading role in advancing knowledge, policy, and practice. Our findings
demonstrating that welfare-to-work programs can increase employment and earnings and
reduce welfare dependency, while paying back more in government budgetary savings
than they cost, now guide policy and practice here and abroad. Similarly, our evidence
that work supports for low-wage workers can increase parents’ earnings and income and
their young children’s school performance has helped point the way out of the
poverty/dependency dilemma. And we are poised to make similar contributions in the
education field and elsewhere.
Yet much remains to be done. A skills shortage looms as more and more of the nation’s jobs
require at least some college education. New solutions are needed to help historically vulnerable
populations succeed, including effective strategies that close the education achievement
letter from the
gap between white and minority children; increase people’s access to and persistence in college;
meet the education, employment, and income needs of single parents and their children;
address the country’s alarmingly high rates of minority male unemployment and incarceration;
combat unrelenting problems like depression and substance abuse; and help the
working poor and hard-to-employ secure their tenuous foothold in the labor market.
In response to these challenges, we have recently organized MDRC’s work around five
thematic policy areas (described in more detail in this report): families and children, K-12
education, youth-to-adult transitions, the hard-to-employ, and low-wage workers. These
themes are a natural outgrowth of our past work in the areas of welfare reform, employment
and training, and youth development. In each area, we seek to bring the kind of
focused, long-term commitment to knowledge-building that has been the hallmark of
MDRC’s work since its founding. Playing the dual roles of technical assistance provider
and evaluator, our challenge is to build both strong programs worthy of rigorous testing
and reliable research designs that can tell us whether the next generation of social policies
and programs are effective. In this undertaking, we attempt to strike a balance
between initiatives that are bold enough to make a substantial difference but that also are
replicable, scalable, and affordable. And we bring to each issue a conviction that answering
the “what difference” question is essential but seldom sufficient; policymakers also
need to know how and why a given policy or program did or did not make a difference.
MDRC’s contributions to date are a testament to the Board’s vision, the commitment and
dedication of a talented and diverse staff, the foresight and support of our funders, and the
many people and organizations we have had the privilege of collaborating with over the
years. For my part, I am honored to follow in the footsteps of three extraordinary former
presidents: MDRC’s founder William Grinker, who conceived and built a new kind of organization
that had no prior model; Barbara Blum, who oversaw the transformation of the
organization from an almost entirely federally funded organization to one with a state focus;
and Judy Gueron, who started at MDRC when the organization was founded, created the
research function, solidified the organization’s commitment to evidence and excellence, and
gave our role new prominence during her last seventeen years here as president. The impact
of their work on policy and practice, along with MDRC’s reputation for excellence, provides
valuable lessons as we create the blueprint for the future of this unique organization.
Knowing that the work we do has important implications for participants, program operators,
and taxpayers, we are energized and humbled by the challenges that lay ahead.
GORDON BERLIN
President, MDRC
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