Currently, 5,100 families are being recruited via the schools' free-lunch program in six city neighborhoods in which the poverty rates exceed 40%. Candidates must have children in the fourth, seventh, or ninth grades and must be documented legal residents or U.S. citizens.
An equal number of families (2,550) will be randomly assigned to a study group and to a control group in order to study the program's efficacy, Ms. Gibbs explained.
Because many low-income families do not have bank accounts, the mayor's office recruited four banks and four credit unions to provide free checking accounts for program participants.
Opportunity NYC, which grew out of Mayor Bloomberg's antipoverty Center for Economic Opportunity, is not the first conditional cash transfer program. The government of Mexico offered the first such program to its citizens in 1997, and nearly one-fourth of the population is enrolled, according to a recent New York Times report. Approximately 20 countries now have such programs in place.
Dr. Mark Krotowski, who practices in the Canarsie area of Brooklyn, nearthe target neighborhood of Brownsville, was sanguine about the program's potential. John R. Bell/Elsevier Global Medical News