The latter list just grew by one, with the establishment of the McSilver Institute for Poverty Policy, Practice and Research at NYU's Silver School of Social Work. Launched last month, the new institute is aimed at collecting, developing and spreading best practices among those who serve the estimated 3 million of New York City's 8.3 million residents who live on incomes under 200 percent of the federal poverty level, which comes to $36,620 for a family of three.
NYU leaders along with benefactor alumni Constance and Martin Silver – after whom the social work school is named – saw a need among the city's think tanks and direct-service agencies for a new institution to serve as a clearinghouse for what works. Formed with a $15 million gift from the Silvers (the "Mc" comes from Mrs. Silver's maiden name, McCatherin), the institute incorporates a variety of efforts – from new graduate and undergraduate coursework, to an array of pilot projects, to an organized effort to collect and disseminate program information.
“We are more action-oriented than other poverty institutes,” said Robert L. Hawkins, the McSilver Assistant Professor in Poverty Studies. "We do what other poverty institutes do, but we want to be proactive and work with the community, knowing that some of the best ideas can come from agencies that don’t have the resources to move forward.”
At a launch event Oct. 16, Hawkins related the work ahead to his own experience. He recalled growing up in rural North Carolina, where his four-month old sister died of pneumonia – but really, he thinks, she died of poverty. He survived, and his personal connection to the subject was later magnified by studying families with a history of domestic violence who survived Hurricane Katrina, which devastated poor people of color more than any other group. Through that work, he developed a model called Economic Empowerment Assessment, "a diagnostic tool," used to look at the lives of those who have experienced negative life events and identify where interventions could have been, with the goal of identifying where interventions can still be made.
This approach relates back to Hawkins' life; he survived poverty because there were interventions on his behalf. Economic Empowerment Assessment focuses on the subject’s relation to money and ideas about their economic status, and it helps them set goals to get out of poverty. The tool is action-oriented, as it intends to study existing models in an individual’s life and develop ways to change it and them for the better.
"We're calling it financial social work," said Silver School visiting professor Phil Coltoff, a former CEO of the Children's Aid Society and a primary advisor for the institute.
"We will utilize the world of practice as it is and add to it things that haven't been done in education and social work since the Great Depression," Coltoff said. In recent years, social work largely has been focused on clinical interventions rather than broad societal reform, but "the origins of social work were not in clinical practice, it was much more in helping to relate people and their needs to society."
Part of this view is an explicit focus on race. Hawkins adds that although there is a challenge in bringing the reality of structural racism to the table, they won’t back down from it and welcome the conflict as a good thing in understanding how race works in poverty. He said the institute will strive to be a link between the academic and the agency, research and practice, and finally the resource and the individual, to find solutions to one of society’s most intractable problems. Its focus will mostly be local, but eventually communications about successful programs will flow nationally and even internationally, Coltoff said.
