National Poverty Center

IN 1964 PRESIDENT LYNDON Johnson declared the War on Poverty. The establishment of a national poverty center was part of that effort. Much like the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which conducts and sponsors health research, the National Poverty Center (NPC) is a federally sponsored research center designed to conduct and support research that can be used to help the nation understand the causes and effects of poverty and to inform policymaking.

Unlike the NIH, the National Poverty Center has always been located at a nationally prominent research university, and the center receives financial support from its host institution to complement the funds received by the federal government. The university location allows the center to assemble renowned scholars [Page 753]from many different disciplines—which is important because poverty is a multifaceted social problem—all while operating in a nonpartisan fashion and free from political influence.

This government-sponsored center was located at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 2005, with Dr. Rebecca Blank, dean of the Gerald Ford School of Public Policy, and Dr. Sheldon Danziger, the Henry J. Meyer Collegiate Professor of Public Policy, serving as codirectors.

When the U.S. federal government declared the War on Poverty, the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) was assigned primary responsibility for carrying out Johnson's poverty-related initiatives. In 1966 the OEO determined that it would be useful for the nation to have a center where experts could perform basic research on the nature, causes, and consequences of poverty in the United States, along with research examining ways the nation might reduce poverty.

This unbiased, nonpartisan, innovative research could then be used to shape and evaluate policies designed to fight poverty. The OEO and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, joined forces in 1966 to create the first center, located at the newly created Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) at the University of Wisconsin.

The University of Wisconsin was a natural choice because many of its faculty members, particularly those in the fields of economics and sociology, had a long tradition of conducting applied social policy research. Several had served in advisory roles for the federal government when the government's antipoverty strategies were being crafted. Dr. Robert Lapman, a professor in the University of Wisconsin's economics department who had once worked for the Council of Economic Advisors, became the first interim director of the institute.

While many researchers, government officials, and community activists working to battle poverty in the 1960s may have hoped that the War on Poverty would be swift and decisive, the problems of poverty in the United States persist today, and the federal government continues to sponsor research through a university-based research institute for this reason. The OEO was eliminated in 1973, and many of its research responsibilities and functions were transferred to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) currently has the task of overseeing funding for the National Poverty Center.

While much of the funding authority for the federal government's involvement in sponsoring poverty research remains tied to Section 1110 of the Social Security Act, the government has modified the way it provides its sponsorship for poverty research over the years. In 1996 the Joint Center for Poverty Research, maintained by both the University of Chicago and Northwestern University, joined IRP as a nationally sponsored site for conducting poverty research. From 1996 to 2002 there were therefore two national poverty centers.

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