Public Safety committee  I'm stuck on this one. We have a long history in the States of philanthropically funded, relatively small-scale programs that have looked very good and have been evaluated and have shown some positive effects. But government, for the most part, has not taken them up because of the fear that doing it at scale would not be successful.

Public Safety committee  Before we got involved in the project, the City of New York was already thinking about doing this. There was some preliminary work before we got involved, which made our lives somewhat easier, at least faster. Nevertheless, I would say that from the time we shook hands with New York City, it was about a year before we got the thing up and running on a pilot stage.

Public Safety committee  That's fine.

Public Safety committee  Do you mean I could have done this by video and stayed in my bed and hung out at home? You guys didn't tell me that.

Public Safety committee  Okay. Just quickly, because MDRC isn't a self-explanatory thing—although the letters are the name of the organization—we're a not-for-profit social policy research organization. We've been around for 35 years or so. We basically evaluate and do demonstration projects of interventions to help low-income individuals and families.