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Community Initiatives
Research on urban poverty, at MDRC and elsewhere, has revealed that the concentration of poverty — and an associated lack of access to good jobs, affordable housing, quality goods and services, and economic and political resources — presents special challenges for improving the economic prospects of people who live in low-income neighborhoods.
Since the early 1990s, a new generation of antipoverty initiatives has emphasized a combination of community revitalization strategies and place-based employment strategies to reverse the effects of concentrated poverty within low-income urban communities. Such efforts seek to increase the social and economic capacity of neighborhoods and to capitalize on concurrent efforts to improve their physical and organizational infrastructure, increase their tax base, and strengthen their connections to jobs and other resources. By combining multiple program interventions — in employment, housing, crime prevention, and economic development — with strategies to mobilize informal resident associations and information networks to support the interventions, these initiatives have sought to harness neighborhoods’ assets to realize larger outcomes for residents.
MDRC has participated in several projects that have attempted to factor in “place” or “community” as an important variable in countering concentrated poverty and joblessness in urban areas. The Jobs-Plus Community Revitalization Initiative for Public Housing Families, launched in 1996, was a national demonstration that sought to increase employment and earnings for working-age residents of public housing by saturating the developments with services, incentives, and social supports that promote work. Jobs-Plus is being replicated in San Antonio, TX, and New York City as part of a grant from the federal Social Innovation Fund (SIF) awarded to the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City and the NYC Center for Economic Opportunity (CEO), for which MDRC is serving as the design and evaluation partnerin the initiative. High-poverty neighborhoods with populations of approximately 10,000-15,000 residents were the focus of the Neighborhood Jobs Initiative (NJI), which explored whether community organizations with strong connections to residents could mobilize resources to achieve lasting employment gains, and whether employment efforts could then serve as a catalyst for broader neighborhood change. MDRC developed, managed, and documented the results of Jobs-Plus and the NJI.
Following these two demonstrations, MDRC was asked to study three projects initiated by national and regional foundations. California Works for Better Health (CWBH), a project of the California Endowment and the Rockefeller Foundation, tested whether better policies and services for poor neighborhoods can raise employment levels appreciably, improving the health status of low-income residents in the process. MDRC conducted an evaluation of the four CWBH sites in California. The Camden Regional Equity Demonstration, funded by the Ford Foundation, focused on revitalization strategies of a city under a five-year state receivership. The study documented the implementation of several major redevelopment strategies in Camden and described whether and how residents, the city as a whole, and the greater metropolitan region benefited from these unprecedented revitalization efforts.
MDRC is also documenting the implementation, achievements, and challenges of the New Communities Program (NCP), an ambitious ten-year initiative operated by the Chicago office of the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) and funded principally by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The NCP uses neighborhood planning, and a cluster of projects and programs driven by neighborhood “quality-of-life plans,” to improve a wide range of outcomes in 16 Chicago neighborhoods.
Key Documents on Community Initiatives
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