Social Safety Net
Single mothers experience high rates of psychological distress. The safety net can help.
The Brookings Institution, along with the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, today announced the launch of a new project, the Future of Children. The core activity of the project will be the publication of a twice-yearly journal of the same name.
“This kind of collaboration between Washington think tanks and major universities is a wave of the future,” said Strobe Talbott, president of Brookings. “We look forward to more such projects, particularly with our colleagues at Princeton.”
The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, which has published The Future of Children since 1991, sought a new editorial team and launched a competition that prompted Brookings children’s experts Isabel V. Sawhill and Ron Haskins to team up with professors at Princeton and submit a joint proposal.
The collaboration will involve not only publishing the journal, but convening briefings in Washington for Congress, the press, and the public on the topics in the publication. Each edition will cover a single children’s issue. Later this year, Packard, the Woodrow Wilson School, and Brookings will release a jointly produced issue on children of immigrant families. In January 2005, the Woodrow Wilson School and Brookings will begin independently publishing The Future of Children. That issue will address racial and ethnic gaps in school readiness.
“This project will enable us to bring new research to bear on policy by looking at the childhood antecedents of a variety of social problems and what could be done to prevent them,” said Isabel V. Sawhill, vice president of Economic Studies at Brookings.
Sawhill and Ron Haskins, who co-direct the Welfare Reform & Beyond initiative at Brookings, will sit on the journal’s five-member editorial board with three Princeton professors—Sara McLanahan, Christina Paxson, and Cecilia Rouse.
Haskins and Sawhill see the new project as a complement to their other efforts to examine the problems facing low-income Americans and to assess policies that could strengthen families, make work pay, and improve opportunities for their children.
About Brookings
The Brookings Institution is a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C. Our mission is to conduct in-depth, nonpartisan research to improve policy and governance at local, national, and global levels.
