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Higher Ground: New Hope for the Working Poor and Their Children

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Higher Ground: New Hope for the Working Poor and their Children provides a detailed background of the many obstacles encountered by the working poor and how the New Hope program intended and its ability to eradicate these obstacles. The book articulates an important social phenomenon in a way that would intrigue and enlighten social policy makers and well versed academics as well as an interested reader without any previous sociological knowledge. One of the most captivating aspects of the book is the personal interviews that provide the reader an incredible insight into the hardships and the tenacity of low-income working mothers and women and how the New Hope program distinctly touched each of their lives.

Duncan, Huston, and Weisner's Higher Ground evaluates the experimental program New Hope, intended to help Milwaukee's poor lift themselves out of poverty. In 1994, a group of social activists implemented a work-based program they had begun dreaming up in 1979. Calling it a "social contract," rather than welfare, the organizers hoped Proejct New Hope could motivate people to work without forcing them to choose between a job and their family's wellbeing. As Duncan, Huston, and Weisner explain, 23 million American adults were living in families below the official poverty line in 1994. The state of employment and the economy made it incredibly difficult for men and women with little education to escape poverty. New Hope was innovative in that it provided an array of work supports, including healthcare, childcare, and housing subsidies, rather than enforcing a "one-size-fits-all" plan. And unlike traditional welfare programs, New Hope was available to both males and females working full-time. Though the experiment lasted only four years, its organizers hope it might become a model for national policy.

The authors provide a detailed description of the program, as well as a clear explanation of the experiment's outcomes - both positive and negative - in comparison with a control group, and they evaluate its costs and benefits. The book also gives attention to several fascinating indirect consequences of the program. For example, participants in the program saw increased marriage rates and greater marital stability compared with non-participants, as well as decreased levels of domestic violence. Perhaps the most interesting results of the program on participants' families were the surprising improvements in children's grades and behavior at school, even after the program's end. Duncan, Huston, and Weisner's book is informative, interesting, and very readable. They present a compelling analysis of an innovative, exciting, and truly hopeful anti-poverty program.