MDRC | |
 | |
| Formation | 1974 |
|---|---|
| Purpose | Policy research |
| Headquarters | New York, NY |
President | Virginia Knox |
| Website | www |
Formerly called | Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation |
MDRC is a nonprofit, nonpartisan education and social policy research organization based in New York City; Washington, DC; and Oakland and Los Angeles, California. MDRC is led by an executive team and Virginia Knox as President since October 15, 2019. [1]
In 1974, the Ford Foundation and six government agencies together created the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation. Its purpose was to implement and document the results of new programs intended to help the poor. [2] In the 1980s and 1990s, it became known for its evaluations of state welfare-to-work programs. [2] It formally retired its original name and adopted "MDRC" as its registered corporate identity in 2003. [3] [4]
MDRC works across the United States, in Canada, and in the United Kingdom. [4] Their 2021 budget is $66 million, which they derive from government contracts, foundations, corporations and individuals. [5]
In May 2018, MDRC named its first Director for Outreach, Diversity, and Inclusion [6] and made this position part of the executive team. [7]
MDRC focuses on five policy areas and has two centers: [8]
MDRC helped pioneer the use of random assignment to test social programs. [9] Its evaluations of welfare work programs influenced the welfare reform of the 1990s. [10] In the 1990s and 2000s, MDRC's evaluation of the Career Academies high school reform model, which showed impacts on participants' earnings eight years after graduation, influenced the expansion of the model around the nation. [11] MDRC was the intermediary for the first social impact bond demonstration in the United States, a project to reduce recidivism among 16- to 18-year-olds incarcerated at Rikers Island. [12] [13] MDRC's study of the City University of New York's Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) has demonstrated that the program has doubled the three-year graduation rate of students who begin college requiring remedial education. [14]
Keuka College is a private college in Keuka Park, New York, situated on Keuka Lake. Founded in 1890, the college emphasizes experiential learning as well as career and pre-professional education. It is classified among "Master's Colleges and Universities (small)" and accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. The college offers both bachelor's and master's degrees on its home campus.
Recidivism is the act of a person repeating an undesirable behavior after they have experienced negative consequences of that behavior, or have been trained to extinguish. It is also used to refer to the percentage of former prisoners who are rearrested for a similar offense.
The Columbia University School of Social Work is the graduate school of social work of Columbia University. It is the nation's oldest social work program, with roots extending back to 1898, when the New York Charity Organization Society's first summer course was announced in The New York Times and began awarding the Master of Science (MS) degree in 1940. With an enrollment of over 900, it is one of the largest social work schools in the United States. The combination of its age and size has led to the School becoming a repository for much of the reference literature in the social work field.
Prison education is any educational activity that occurs inside prison. Courses can include basic literacy programmes, secondary school equivalency programmes, vocational education, and tertiary education. Other activities such as rehabilitation programs, physical education, and arts and crafts programmes may also be considered a form of prison education. Programmes are typically provided, managed, and funded by the prison system, though inmates may be required to pay for distance education programmes. The history of and current practices in prison education vary greatly among countries.
The Carnegie Corporation of New York is a philanthropic fund established by Andrew Carnegie in 1911 to support education programs across the United States, and later the world.
Temporary Assistance for Needy Families is a federal assistance program of the United States. It began on July 1, 1997, and succeeded the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, providing cash assistance to indigent American families through the United States Department of Health and Human Services. TANF is often simply referred to as welfare.
The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) is a United States federal law passed by the 104th United States Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton. The bill implemented major changes to U.S. social welfare policy, replacing the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program.
The Cape York Institute for Policy and Leadership, also known as the Cape York Institute, is an Australian public policy organisation which researches and implements welfare reforms to reduce social inequalities between Indigenous and Non-Indigenous peoples living in Cape York. The Cape York Institute was founded by lawyer, academic and Indigenous welfare advocate Noel Pearson. Established in July 2004, the organisation was developed in collaboration with the people of Cape York and Griffith University. The Institute prepares reports and submissions to the Australian Federal Government, identifying priority areas of welfare and economic reform to restore social norms within the Cape York communities. To deliver welfare and economic reform, the Institute engages with a number of partner organisations including the Cape York Partnerships, Family Responsibilities Commission, Balkanu Cape York Development Corporation and the Cape York Aboriginal Australian Academy. The Cape York Institute receives Commonwealth and Queensland State Government funding to support Welfare Reform Projects in areas of Indigenous education, employment, families and housing.
Judith M. Gueron is an expert in research on unemployment, social disadvantage and family welfare. She is an Independent Scholar in Residence and President Emerita at MDRC, a nonprofit research organization that designs, manages, and studies projects to increase the self-sufficiency of economically disadvantaged groups.
The Maryland School of Public Policy is one of 14 schools at the University of Maryland, College Park. The school is located inside the Capital Beltway and ranks 16th nationally for schools of public policy according to U.S. News & World Report (2012).
The Doe Fund is a nonprofit organization in the United States that provides paid transitional work, housing, educational opportunities, counseling, and career training to people with histories of homelessness, incarceration, and substance abuse.
The United States spends approximately $2.3 trillion dollars on federal and state social programs include cash assistance, health insurance, food assistance, housing subsidies, energy and utilities subsidies, and education and childcare assistance. Similar benefits are sometimes provided by the private sector either through policy mandates or on a voluntary basis. Employer-sponsored health insurance is an example of this.
Human services is an interdisciplinary field of study with the objective of meeting human needs through an applied knowledge base, focusing on prevention as well as remediation of problems, and maintaining a commitment to improving the overall quality of life of service populations. The process involves the study of social technologies, service technologies, and scientific innovations designed to ameliorate problems and enhance the quality of life of individuals, families and communities to improve the delivery of service with better coordination, accessibility and accountability. The mission of human services is to promote a practice that involves simultaneously working at all levels of society in the process of promoting the autonomy of individuals or groups, making informal or formal human services systems more efficient and effective, and advocating for positive social change within society.
In the United States, drug courts are specialized court docket programs that aim to help participants recover from substance use disorder to reduce future criminal activity. Drug courts are used as an alternative to incarceration and aim to reduce the costs of repeatedly processing low‐level, non‐violent offenders through courts, jails, and prisons. Drug courts are usually managed by a nonadversarial and multidisciplinary team including judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, community corrections, social workers and treatment service professionals. Drug court participants include criminal defendants and offenders, juvenile offenders, and parents with pending child welfare cases.
The Social Research and Demonstration Corporation (SRDC) is an independent non-profit and non-partisan social policy research organization based in Canada, with a focus on designing, implementing and evaluating large-scale demonstration projects.
The Supporting Healthy Marriage Project (SHM) is part of the Healthy Marriage Initiative funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, that was launched in 2003 as "the first large-scale, multisite, multiyear, rigorous test of marriage education programs for low-income married couples". The project is motivated by research that "indicates that married adults and children raised by both parents in stable, low-conflict households do better on a host of outcomes". The evaluation is led by MDRC, in collaboration with Abt Associates and other partners. USASpending.gov reports payments of more than $30 million from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to MDRC for work on the Supporting Healthy Marriage Project from 2009 to 2012.
The Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) is the principal advisory group to the United States Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on policy development and provides coordination and support for HHS's strategic and policy planning, planning and development of legislation, program evaluation, data gathering, policy-related research, and regulatory program.
The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research is an American conservative think tank focused on domestic policy and urban affairs, established in Manhattan in 1978 by Antony Fisher and William J. Casey. The institute has produced books, articles, interviews, speeches, op-eds, policy research, and the quarterly publication City Journal. Reihan Salam is the current president of the organization, which he has led since 2019.
Prisoner reentry is the process by which prisoners who have been released return to the community. Many types of programs have been implemented with the goal of reducing recidivism and have been found to be effective for this purpose. Consideration for the conditions of the communities formerly incarcerated individuals are re-entering, which are often disadvantaged, is a fundamental part of successful re-entry.
Public-private partnerships are cooperative arrangements between two or more public and private sectors, typically of a long-term nature. In the United States, they mostly took the form of toll roads concessions, community post offices and urban renewal projects. In recent years, there has been interest in expanding P3s to multiple infrastructure projects, such as schools, universities, government buildings, waste and water. Reasons for expanding public-private partnership in the United States were initially cost-cutting and concerns about Public debt. In the early 2000s, P3s were implemented sporadically by different States and municipalities with little federal guidance. During Obama's second term, multiple policies were adopted to facilitate P3 projects, and Congress passed bills in that direction with overwhelming bipartisan support. My Brother's Keeper Challenge is an example of a public–private partnership. Some Private-public partnerships were carried out without incident, while others have attracted much controversy.
