New Hope is an employment-based anti-poverty program started by community activists and business leaders in Milwaukee as a model for national policy. The designers believed, "If you work you should not be poor."

New Hope was designed to help working poor families by offering an income supplement, subsidized health care and child care. It offered them a job if they could not find one.

• The program not only increased parents' work and reduced poverty, but also improved school achievement and reduced behavior problems for the children of participating adults. It increased children's experience in childcare centers, after-school programs and other structured activities.
• When children from New Hope families reached adolescence, they had positive expectations about going to college, optimism about the future, and positive attitudes about work.

The Next Generation Project is a collaboration among researchers at MDRC in New York and several universities, including the University of Texas at Austin. We use evidence from New Hope and other policy experiments to understand the conditions under which policy-induced increases in employment among low-income, single parents can promote children's well-being or reduce it. Unique to this research is the synthesis of results from several random assignment experiments (including New Hope) launched in the late 1980s and early 1990s to learn how policies designed to increase employment and reduce welfare receipt among low-income parents can affect the development of their children.

• Programs and policies that supplement earnings increase family income and improve children's school achievement. Without earnings supplements, single parents' earnings alone do not improve income, and children's achievement is not improved.
• Programs that offer improved child care assistance lead parents to use center-based child care instead of care by relatives and others in their homes. Center experiences help to improve children's achievement when they enter school and to reduce behavior problems.

Funders for New Hope and Next Generation include the the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Helen Bader Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the State of Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development, the William T. Grant Foundation, and the Annie E. Casey Foundation.