Eligible families not assigned to Family Rewards were not eligible to receive cash incentives.
Family Rewards’ per-family costs were $13,093 (2014 dollars) over three years, including reward payments and operation costs. The study did not discuss a comparison of costs and benefits.
The program lasted three years, from September 2007 to August 2010. Evaluators began enrolling families in the study in July 2007 and concluded enrollment in January 2008. The study followed participants for about 42 months after enrollment.
The Family Rewards program issued payments to participating families’ bank accounts for each activity that families completed or each condition that they met from an established list. The payments varied from $20 per month for maintaining public or private health insurance for each parent, to $600 when high school students accumulated 11 course credits or passed a statewide standardized exam. Payments were delivered every two months based on the activities or milestones recently completed. Family Rewards incentivized three categories of activities:
- Children’s educational efforts and achievement. Family Rewards provided incentives to support children’s educational attainment, including school attendance, achievement levels on standardized tests, and parental engagement with students’ education.
- Family preventive health care practices. Family Rewards incentivized preventive health care practices, such as maintaining health insurance coverage for all members of the family and completing nonemergency medical and dental checkups.
- Employment. Family Rewards incentivized adult workforce efforts by providing payments for maintaining full-time work and participating in approved education and job-training activities. Incentives included payments of $150 per month for sustaining full-time employment (30 hours per week for 6 out of every 8 weeks) and up to $3,000 over 3 years for participating in education and training, such as occupational skills training, English as a second language instruction, or GED preparation, while employed at least 10 hours per week.
The intervention was mostly implemented as planned, but there were challenges in recruiting families and orienting them to the program because of the complexity of the incentive eligibility. For example, Seedco provided coupon books with the names of family members and rewards that each was eligible for, but these were delayed while the conditions and rewards were being finalized. Several incentives were discontinued after the first or second year of the study to simplify the program’s operations and reduce its costs.
The study did not discuss any tools to measure fidelity to the intervention model, but it did mention that Seedco ensured fidelity to the program model, including adherence to a “no case management” rule, meaning staff did not offer any direct services or follow-up to help families get services to address barriers or meet their goals.
The study was funded by the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City, Bloomberg Philanthropies, The Rockefeller Foundation, The Starr Foundation, the Open Society Institute, the Robin Hood Foundation, the Tiger Foundation, The Annie E. Casey Foundation, American International Group, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the New York Community Trust.
The Family Rewards program was implemented in New York City, NY. Families were recruited from six high-poverty neighborhoods, two each in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Manhattan.
Seedco, a private, national economic and workforce development agency, acted as an intermediary between Opportunity-NYC Family Rewards, which funded the conditional cash transfer program, and six community-based organizations that facilitated the program in each of the neighborhoods served.
Seedco partnered with six neighborhood partner organizations to implement the Family Rewards intervention. The six neighborhood partner organizations were as follows: Urban Health Plan and BronxWorks in the Bronx; Brownsville Multi-Service Center (part of the Brownsville Community Development Corporation) and Groundwork, Inc. in Brooklyn; and Catholic Charities Community Services, Joseph P. Kennedy Center, and Union Settlement Association in Manhattan.
Family Rewards served families with children in fourth, seventh, or ninth grade who were enrolled in the National School Lunch Program, which served as a proxy for identifying families with incomes at or below 130 percent of the federal poverty level. More than 80 percent of families served were one-parent families, with an average of 2.5 children per household. The majority of parents were female (94 percent) and Hispanic or Black (98 percent). Participation was voluntary.
More than 99 percent of families earned at least one reward in the first three years of the program, receiving an average of $8,707 over this period.
Each of the six community-based organizations designated the equivalent of two full-time staff to conduct start-up activities, including recruitment and orientation, and to provide customer service, including helping families redeem rewards, providing referrals, and hosting social events. The study authors did not include information on the training, degrees, or certifications of staff.