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About the Authors
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GREG J. DUNCAN is the Edwina S. Tarry professor of education and
social policy at Northwestern University and a faculty fellow at the Institute
for Policy Research.
Duncan, with members of the New Hope team, call for a national program modeled on New Hope to address the growing ranks of the working poor. The policy paper is part of the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project.
Read more
View policy brief
View paper
View presentation
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ALETHA C. HUSTON is the Priscilla Pond Flawn Regents professor
of child development in the department of human ecology at the University
of Texas, Austin and associate director of the Population Research Center. |
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THOMAS S. WEISNER is professor of anthropology at the Departments
of Anthropology and Psychiatry (Semel Institute, Center for Culture and
Health), University of California, Los Angeles. Weisner is the author, with H. Yoshikawa, and E. Lowe, of a companion volume to Higher Ground, Making It Work: Low-Wage Employment, Family Life and Child Development.
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New Hope Organizers
Julie Kerksick, the on-the-ground know-how behind New Hope
“We very much came at this from outside the welfare system,” Kerksick
says. “For us, work was not a four-letter word. Our whole perspective
was shaped by people who wanted to work.’”
JULIE KERKSICK is the current director of the New
Hope Project. Kerksick
was one of the program's original organizers and played several management
roles in the demonstration project. Kerksick has spent her entire professional
career, spanning three decades, working with and on behalf of unemployed
and low-income workers. She has helped design public policy to assist unemployed
and underemployed workers, but also shared in the responsibility of translating
those policies to operating programs and procedures. Kerksick was an Atlantic
Fellow in Public Policy, studying employment and welfare-to-work programs
in the United Kingdom from 2000-2001. She served on the Board of Directors
for the Transitional Work Corporation in Philadelphia for eight years, and
just completed a four year term on the Policy Council of the Association
for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM). Kerksick currently serves
on the Steering Committee of the National Transitional Jobs Network and the
Board of Directors for First Service Credit Union.
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David Riemer, one of the visionaries and policymakers behind New Hope
Riemer served in the Carter administration as counsel to a Senate subcommittee
on health care. Working in various positions within and
outside of Wisconsin state government, he helped create a public-defender
program for the indigent, reformed the state’s Children’s Code, and fashioned Wisconsin’s
Earned Income Credit, health insurance, and child-care subsidy programs. Beginning
in the late 1980s, he held various high-level administrative positions for
the City of Milwaukee, helping to design Milwaukee’s controversial school-voucher
system and pushing for the wholesale replacement of Wisconsin’s Aid to
Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program with a New Hope–style
set of work supports.
Tom Schrader , CEO, Wisconsin Gas Company, integral to rallying
the Milwaukee business and funding communities
“The idea for New Hope was comprehensive. It was economic-driven,
and it really was going to take out some of the underpinnings that had created
the dependencies that were in the social system at the
time.”
Schrader knew early that he wanted to do something more than just engineering
when he graduated from Princeton—he wanted to have a larger impact on
the world. For Schrader, New Hope was appealing on both moral and economic
grounds. “How many times in your life do you get to be part of something
that would make that big a difference for individuals
and for public policy?”
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