Bloomberg introduced the idea for the innovation fund at the winter meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, held annually in Washington for leaders from the 1,200 largest cities. He described it as modeled on the Center for Economic Opportunity (CEO), the public-private partnership his administration created in 2006 to address local poverty in specific ways. The Innovation Fund would spread the CEO’s strategy of incubating smaller pilot programs whose progress is measured, inviting other urban centers to develop their own poverty-fighting pilots and expand those that meet with success.
The Fund has been part of ongoing stimulus package discussions, according to officials both at the city and federal level. CEO spokeswoman Kathleen Carlson said the proposal had been issued in formal communication stating NYC’s priorities to Congress and the White House and that reactions had been “positive thus far.” Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Linda Gibbs also visited the offices of several representatives and senators to advocate for the innovation fund along with other NYC priorities.
While many of the programs in the CEO are still undergoing further evaluation, Bich Ha Pham, the director of policy, advocacy, and research at the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies, said that the waitlists for several programs demonstrated that the CEO was meeting a “clear need.” She said that the sign of an effective program is when attendees are recommending it to others, and talked about how participants were urging friends and family to join because of their own experiences with the CEO.
The fund would also manage a plan to revise the national poverty measure, a decades-old formula that many experts have argued is out of date and underrepresents the actual number of impoverished people. New York City implemented its own updated assessment formula last summer, using a wider variety of criteria to demarcate poverty as opposed to the current federal standard, which is determined only by a formula based on the price of food. Under the new measure, NYC saw a 4 percent increase in those qualified as “living in poverty.”
Jeremy Reiss, director of workforce mobility at the Community Service Society, lauded the revised poverty measure and noted that revising the poverty line at the federal level would increase eligibility for current entitlement programs like Medicaid and food stamps. “It’s historic,” Reiss said, “that a major urban leader is looking at systemic poverty issues.”
He also thought that expanding New York City’s approaches into a national fund was potentially a good step, noting that while each of the individual programs may be small, they are meeting the “discrete needs” of their target populations.
CEO spokeswoman Carlson pointed to several programs as likely candidates for expansion if the fund materializes, but would not estimate how much money the city might stand to gain. In their first year of existence, the Young Adult Internship Program connected more than 1,300 youth to short-term paid internships, job placements, education and training and follow-up services, she said, and the Community Based Organization Outreach initiative – which extends the reach of the city's Workforce 1 Career Centers – placed more than 2,000 people into jobs. CUNY's Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP), which is funded by CEO and provides academic and economic support to help students complete associate's degrees more quickly, also is showing early promising results with students demonstrating better academic achievement and college retention than a comparison group. In fact, some tenets of the ASAP approach, such as a summer orientation session and required full-time enrollment, have been incorporated into CUNY's proposal for a new 5,000-student campus in Manhattan.
