The Northwestern University/University of Chicago Joint Center for Poverty Research (JCPR) was the joint project of two private Chicago universities. The University of Chicago was founded in 1890 with a donation from oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller and was later an important part of the Manhattan Project. Northwestern University was founded in 1851 by John Evans to serve the educational needs of the states that had once been part of the Northwest Territory (Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin). Today, Northwestern has one of the largest university endowments in the United States and is in the first tier of American research universities.

Founded in 1996, the JCPR was initially funded with a $7.5 million grant from the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of the ...