New York City’s Center for Economic opportunity led the United States in launching Opportunity New York City as an experimental and privately funded program to help families in six of the city’s highest-poverty communities break the cycle of intergenerational poverty (Riccio, 2010) . The ONYC study aimed to test the impact of the cash transfers on the health of the family, education of the children, and the outcomes of the adults’ workforce in the household. Also, this program was based on the pioneering conditional cash transfer program of Mexico named Oportunidades. In addition, the ONYC conditional cash transfer program greatly benefitted the lower- and middle-income countries. However, being the first comprehensive Conditional Cash Transfer Program in a developed country, the Family Rewards of the ONYC has been the main focus of other countries. The program is also coordinated by Seedco which is a private and nonprofit intermediary organization along with six other community based organizations. It was evaluated by the MDRC, which helped in the designing of the initiative through randomized control trial.
Included in the program are financial rewards that are given to participants who were able to meet the conditions set by the coordinators. Some of the conditions were meeting goal for the children’s attendance in school, levels of achievements on the children’s standardized tests, maintaining of health insurance coverage and obtaining age-appropriate preventive medical and dental check-ups of the family, sustaining full-time jobs and completing approved education or job training activities. The conditions of the program were focused on education, health-related, and work-related aspects of the community. The ONYC: Family Rewards chose to test different values of rewards ranging from $20 to $600 to observe which incentives are applicable in the context of the United States. With its wide range of activities, the program also taught the participants