On Tuesday, March 30, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and MDRC President Gordon Berlin released early findings from MDRC’s evaluation of Opportunity NYC-Family Rewards, the city’s conditional cash transfer (CCT) initiative for low-income families. The press event was hosted by Carolyn McLaughlin, Executive Director of BronxWorks, one of the six community-based organizations that delivered the program.

In its first two years, Opportunity NYC–Family Rewards substantially reduced poverty and material hardship and had a range of positive results in improving some education, health-related, and work-related outcomes, according to MDRC’s report, Toward Reduced Poverty Across Generations: Early Findings from New York City’s Conditional Cash Transfer Program, by James Riccio, Nadine Dechausay, David Greenberg, Cynthia Miller, Zawadi Rucks, and Nandita Verma. The report focuses on the first two years of this rapidly implemented initiative. The third and final year of the program is currently under way.

Opportunity NYC–Family Rewards was launched by New York City’s Center for Economic Opportunity in 2007 as an experimental, privately funded program to help families in six of the city’s highest-poverty communities break the cycle of intergenerational poverty. The program offers cash assistance to reduce immediate hardship and poverty but conditions this assistance on families’ efforts to improve children’s school performance, family preventive health care, and parents’ work and training — in the hope of reducing poverty over the longer term. Inspired by Mexico’s pioneering Oportunidades program, Family Rewards is the first comprehensive CCT program in a developed country.

An incentives-only program (with no social services or case management component), Family Rewards is coordinated by a private, nonprofit intermediary organization, Seedco, in partnership with six community-based organizations. It is being evaluated by MDRC, which helped design the initiative, through a randomized control trial involving approximately 4,800 families and 11,000 children, half of whom can receive the program incentives and half who have been assigned to a control group.

In the third and final year of Opportunity NYC–Family Rewards (September 2009-August 2010), the program has reduced and simplified the number of incentives offered to families, in an effort to improve program operations and focus families on the most high-priority incentives. MDRC will follow the families in the study for five years — including two years after the program ends, when the incentives are no longer available — and will release a series of reports between now and 2013.

For more information, contact John Hutchins, MDRC Communications Director, 212-340-8604, john.hutchins@mdrc.org.