The New Hope Project: Building Bridges to Work

From Cellblock to Craft

April 14th, 2008 in Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Taycheedah prison has instituted a program to train inmates as dental lab technicians. The New Hope Project is mentioned as the Milwaukee site for the multi-city, three-year Joyce Foundation experiment. Executive Director, Julie Kerksick, is quoted.

New State project links parolees to work

February 21st, 2008 in Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Two state departments said Thursday that they were teaming up with the Milwaukee Area Workforce Investment Board on a $400,000 pilot project to put parolees and young adults with little training or experience into good jobs with benefits. New Hope Project's Executive Director, Julie Kerksick, is interviewed for this article. Read the Journal Sentinel article.

Forum looks at New Hope's plan for making work pay

December 15th, 2007 in Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Reporter Audrey Hoffer briefs readers that Washington, D.C.'s Hamilton Project at Brookings highlighted New Hope Project's success. Read the Journal Sentinel article.

Editorial: Childhood Poverty Reduced Under New Hope Project Program

October 16th, 2007 in Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Editorial
Speakers at the recent conference on Children's Health, Poverty and Ethical Issues of Social Justice pointed to the long term positive effects on the children whose parents participated in the original New Hope Project demonstration program. Editors at Milwaukee's Journal Sentinel believe, "The nation must overcome the main obstacle to fighting [childhood poverty]: the lack of will to do so." Read the editorial posted October 12, 2007.

Executive Director Julie Kerksick on WHAD Wisconsin Public Radio 90.7 FM

August 31st, 2007
What's the real effect of economic growth on the majority? Wisconsin Public Radio's Kathleen Dunn and her guests Julie Kerksick and Charity Eleson discuss a recent Census Bureau report that the median household income rose point-seven-percent last year, but Milwaukee had the nation's eighth-highest poverty rate.

- Julie Kerksick, executive director, The New Hope Project, Milwaukee.
- Charity Eleson, executive director, Wisconsin Council on Children and Families.

Prisoner re-entry series -- Part I: Job programs try to help inmates start off right

August 14th, 2007 in WHAD - Wisconsin Public Radio 90.7 FM
Nationally, the phrase "prisoner re-entry" has become a buzz word. Over the past decade millions of dollars, both public and private, have been spent on programs designed to reduce the human traffic surging in and out through the revolving prison doors. The most recent study in Wisconsin shows that more than a third of inmates released wind up back in prison within three years. In the first of a 5 part series, Gil Halsted reports on one of the latest efforts in Milwaukee to at least slow down the revolving door…

Ex-inmates helped into work world: New Hope program eases post-prison transition

June 19th, 2007 in Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
In the governor's budget, it's a $1 million outlay for a prison-to-work program in Milwaukee. But in the eyes of Jeannette Tyra, the New Hope Project's transitional jobs initiative is a way to give convicted criminals a chance at redemption.

Tyra owns Phil's Auto Parts, a 10-worker shop at 1920 W. North Ave. A female boss in a male-dominated business, she says she has had her fill of people pre-judging what she can and can't do.

"So many people are looked at for what they have gone through instead of what kind of change they want to make," Tyra said. "I just feel like (New Hope is) giving them an opportunity to make a difference, to make a change, and who am I to judge?"

Tyra has hired five employees through New Hope's transitional jobs project, which the non-profit agency began in 2005. The program provides training, coaching and individualized supports to help former inmates. And it guarantees work through a job subsidized by New Hope at minimum wage for up to four months - up to two months at for-profit employers.

"The idea is that, if we can be more successful and have better results in employment when an offender returns to the community, we're going to have less crime, greater safety and ultimately less cost to the taxpayer," said Matthew Frank, secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Corrections.

Most prisoners eventually return to Wisconsin communities, Frank noted. Nearly 2,300 inmates are scheduled to be released between May 1 and the end of August, 43% of them - 975 - to Milwaukee County, according to department estimates.

"If an offender becomes gainfully employed," Frank said, "not only are we saving the $26,000 a year it would cost to re-incarcerate them in prison, but they are becoming law-abiding citizens who aren't committing new crimes, who are also taxpayers."

The New Hope model received a nod from the Legislature's Joint Finance Committee on Wednesday as it considered Gov. Jim Doyle's budget for the Department of Corrections. As approved by the panel, the state would furnish $1 million divided over the next two years to help support New Hope's re-entry project.

That state support would be a boost from $177,000 last year, as the program ramps up its efforts as part of a multiple-site study of the best ways to help prisoners re-enter society.

The Chicago-based Joyce Foundation has selected New Hope as one of five projects in four cities to receive $5.4 million in grants over three years. The philanthropy's $588,520 to New Hope is to test whether subsidized transitional jobs can improve former inmates' chances for employment and reduce their rate of recidivism.

The grants are supposed cover up to 40% of the programs' costs in the three-year period. State funds would help defray New Hope's expenses for staffing, supplies and overhead, as well as some of the wages and taxes for subsidized work.

In 2009, an independent research firm will evaluate the results of demonstration projects in Milwaukee as well as Chicago, Detroit and St. Paul, Minn. The other projects are receiving at least as much in state funding as Doyle has requested, said New Hope executive director Julie Kerksick.

"Because this is part of an evaluation project, it's really an investment in future statewide programming," Kerksick said.

Research from previous New Hope initiatives has helped inform the development of Wisconsin's BadgerCare health plan for children and low-income workers as well as the W-2 (Wisconsin Works) welfare-to-work program.

Kerksick said New Hope is trying to enroll more than 300 former inmates in its program, as well as 300 participants in a comparison group that gets employment services without subsidized jobs.

As far as Tyra is concerned, workers who have returned from prison and gone through the New Hope program have made better employees, in part because they're more motivated.

"They have more to lose, so they have more to prove," Tyra said. "Most recipients I meet from New Hope, that's what they're looking for - a new hope."

Major Study Finds That Strengthening the Safety Net for Working Poor Parents Has Lasting Benefits for Their Children

June 10th, 2003 in MDRC
A new study, released today by the University of Texas at Austin and MDRC, reports that New Hope, a pioneering Milwaukee initiative designed to boost household income and to provide work supports for low-income working families, has led to long-term gains in children's school performance and important improvements in children's behavior. Improving the well-being of children has been an objective of national welfare policy since welfare's beginnings in 1935. But since the 1970's and culminating with the passage of the 1996 welfare reform law and its imposition of time limits on benefit receipt, this goal has been overshadowed by concerns about moving welfare recipients away from dependency and into employment. Now, as federal and state policymakers debate the reauthorization of the 1996 law, a consensus has emerged to make improving the well-being of children the overarching issue. The New Hope findings provide solid evidence of a policy intervention that achieves this long-deferred national goal.

Editorial: The promise of New Hope

July 2nd, 2003 in Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
In the 1990s, when the nation was contemplating alternatives to traditional welfare, Milwaukee went beyond contemplation and actually put into motion a pilot, work-oriented assistance program dubbed the New Hope Project. The test ran just four years - from 1994 to '98 - but the research findings continue to stream in.

'Fast Facts' on Poverty

April 20th, 2007
In 2006, 37 million (12.6%) American adults were living in families with incomes below the official poverty line, about $15,720 for a family of three (two adults, one child).
Source: Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2005;
See details on poverty thresholds: U.S. Bureau of the Census

Poverty is surprisingly common among full-time working adults in the United States. At the inception of the New Hope program in 1994, 6.5 million American adults, whether parents or not, were working full time but earned too little to lift their families above the poverty line. In 2004, 5.7 million adults were working full-time but still living in poverty, affecting 6.8 million children.
Source: Calculations from Current Population Surveys, conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. Adult data apply to individuals between age 18 and 54. Working-poor adults as those who report working 30 or more “usual” weekly hours and who live in a family with total income below the poverty line.