A Major Congressional Report on Reducing Child Poverty Endorses NYC Opportunity’s WorkAdvance
Congress has released a major new report on how to reduce child poverty and one of its main recommendations is scaling up WorkAdvance, a NYC Opportunity program that it calls “perhaps the leading example of the new ‘sectoral ‘ training approach” to workforce development.
Congress commissioned the report in 2015 as part of a bipartisan funding agreement, at the urging of progressive House members. It asked the National Academy of Sciences to gather a group of experts to produce a report that made a non-partisan, evidence-based assessment of the most promising methods of cutting child poverty in half in 10 years. The result is A Roadmap to Reducing Childhood Poverty (2019).
In a section entitled “Scaling Up the WorkAdvance Program” the report states:
WorkAdvance is perhaps the leading example of the new ‘sectoral’ training approach, in which program staff work closely with employers to place disadvantaged individuals with moderate job skills into training programs for specific sectors that have a strong demand for local workers.
The report also highlights an evaluation of the program done by NYC Opportunity with MDRC, studying the model across three cities. The report notes that a “random-assignment evaluation of WorkAdvance showed that it increased work and earnings across most of its sites.”
A Roadmap to Reducing Childhood Poverty, produced by a committee of leading poverty experts from academia, think tanks, and non-profit organizations, also recommends an increased Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), a higher minimum wage, and a fully refundable Child Care Tax Credit, among other initiatives.
Read more about the report
Read A Roadmap to Reducing Childhood Poverty (Full Report)
To learn more about WorkAdvance, view an explanatory infographic from MDRC
