The online publication Gotham Gazette, which covers policy issues in New York City, has posted an article, Cash Incentives for the Poor, by Besa Luci, profiling the new Opportunity NYC project, an initiative of Mayor Bloomberg’s Center for Economic Opportunity, which was created to implement the recommendations of his second-term Poverty Commission.

Opportunity NYC includes three separate demonstration programs that involve new forms of temporary cash payments to poor families to boost their income in the short-term while building their capacity to avoid longer-term and second-generation poverty. MDRC has helped design two of these programs and is leading a random assignment evaluation of their effectiveness.

The Gotham Gazette highlighted the importance of the MDRC study of Opportunity NYC:

Opportunity NYC is privately funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, the Starr Foundation, the Robin Hood Foundation, the Open Society Institute, the American International Group, the Broad Foundation, Mayor Bloomberg and other sources. Eventually though the project could be publicly funded.

Before that can happen though, the government must determine whether the effort has been successful. To do that, MDRC, a non-for-profit social policy and research firm, will compare families receiving the incentives with those in a control group.

“The pilot …will run for two to three years depending on funding levels,” said Dawn Walker of the mayor’s press office. As the program proceeds and for as many as four years after it ends, she said, a “long-term evaluation will help identify what long-term impacts the incentives have on participant families.”

The results of that study could determine whether this pilot program eventually changes the way we address poverty in New York City and beyond.