Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced a new anti-poverty pilot program that will award poor families up to $5,000 a year for taking such steps as visiting the dentist, attending parent-teacher conferences, or having a child with perfect school attendance. The program will track the progress of the 2,500 randomly selected families against 2,500 other randomly selected families not receiving rewards.
Joel Berg, Executive Director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, had this to say about the program, "It's certainly good to experiment with new efforts such as this. However, it is important to keep in mind that the 2,500 people to be impacted represent less than two-tenths of one percent of the 1.7 million New Yorkers in poverty. We also need far bolder efforts to create large numbers of living wage jobs and make food, health care, housing, and child care, more affordable for low-income New Yorkers."
Providing news and commentary on issues facing the City's anti-hunger community
The New York City Coalition Against Hunger represents New York City’s over 1,200 soup kitchens and food pantries and the 1.3 million low income New Yorkers who are forced to use them. The Coalition works to meet the immediate food needs of low-income New Yorkers and enact innovative solutions to help them move “beyond the soup kitchen” to self-sufficiency.
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3 comments:
Does it worry you that of the $50 Million this project will cost ($42M from foundations and 8M in monitoring costs from NYC) no more than $12.5 Million will go to poor people? Overhead and evaluation eat up 3/4 of the total budget. How cost-effective, do you think, such an overhead to program ratio is?
Interesting comment, Daniel. Where did you find this information? Can you provide our readers with a citation?
You can review the Mayor's press release here
It states that 5,000 families will be ion the program. Of those, 2500 will be controls and get no money. The other 2,500 can get as much as $5000 if they do things the Mayor wants them to do. When I multiply that out, the aggregate amount spent on the poor won't exceed $12.5 Million. If the total program is set to cost $50, where's the rest of the money going? Seedco, the very large non-profit run by a bevy of former HRA administrators is to run the program. How much are they being paid to run the program? Were there bids?
When the program was first announced, I seem to recall, the Mayor's Commission on Economic Opportunity said NYC would pay $8 million for evaluation.
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