For at least three decades, policymakers have struggled to promote work among welfare recipients, while continuing to protect these vulnerable families from economic deprivation. At first, work-oriented services were offered on a voluntary basis to a narrow range of recipients. Over time, participation in work-focused activities became mandatory, initially for recipients with no young children and, eventually, for a very broad share of the welfare caseload. MDRC’s pathbreaking welfare studies have provided rigorous evidence at every major stage of this evolving story and on every major programmatic strategy that has been tried.
Current Projects
Our current studies are examining targeted programs for particularly disadvantaged subsets of the welfare population who are increasingly expected to work. As part of the federally funded Enhanced Services for the Hard-to-Employ Demonstration, MDRC is testing alternative employment strategies for welfare recipients in Philadelphia, including a program that uses an innovative transitional work model. As part of another federally funded, multisite project, MDRC is testing three specialized welfare-to-work programs, two in New York City (one targeting recipients with work-limiting disabilities and another targeting recipients with substance abuse problems) and a third in Minnesota, targeting long-term recipients who have been unsuccessful in the state’s regular welfare-to-work program.
Completed Projects
Welfare reform faces its biggest challenge in large cities. The Project on Devolution and Urban Change was a multifaceted study of the implementation of welfare reform and its effects on families, neighborhoods, and institutions in four large urban counties.
Time limits on benefit receipt were among the most dramatic features of the 1990s welfare reforms. The evaluations of Connecticut’s Jobs First Program and Florida’s Family Transition Program are the only random assignment studies of state welfare reforms that included time limits that result in the termination a family’s entire welfare grant. The Cross-State Study of Time-Limited Welfare and a federally funded synthesis of research on time limits examined time limits more broadly.
Another set of studies examined different earnings supplementation strategies. The studies have examined the cost of various approaches, as well as their effects on work, welfare receipt, and the well-being of families and children.
Finally, over the past two decades, MDRC has conducted a series of large-scale random assignment studies that have provided reliable evidence both on the effects of welfare-to-work mandates and on the relative effectiveness and costs of different employment-service strategies. Taken together, these studies have produced an unparalleled knowledge base that has directly shaped policy and practice at the federal, state, and local levels. The most comprehensive of these studies, the National Evaluation of Welfare-to-Work Strategies, evaluated 11 mandatory welfare-to-work programs in seven sites in the 1990s. During the same period, the evaluation of the Los Angeles Jobs-First GAIN program tested one of the nation’s largest welfare-to-work programs, and the evaluation of Vermont’s Welfare Restructuring Project examined one of the earliest statewide welfare reform initiatives of the 1990s. A series of papers examined the implementation of the Wisconsin Works welfare reform initiative, concentrating on the state’s largest urban county, Milwaukee.
These studies built on pathbreaking evaluations of earlier welfare-to-work programs, including the six-county study of California’s Greater Avenues for Independence (GAIN) program, the Saturation Work Initiative Model (SWIM) in San Diego, and the multi-state Demonstration of State Work/Welfare Initiatives.
Key Documents on Welfare Reform
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