Series 8

Administrative History

The Hudson Institute was founded in 1961 at Croton-on-Hudson, New York, with a broadly defined mission to think about the future in unconventional ways. After moving to Indianapolis in 1984, the think-tank began focusing on domestic, social, and economic issues, including welfare reform.

In 1994, the Hudson Institute Welfare Policy Center opened an office in Madison, Wisconsin to advise the Thompson administration on its welfare reform efforts. The center helped to design the Wisconsin Works program, and it administered the W-2 Management and Evaluation Project (MEP) from 1997 to 2001. The MEP coordinated externally funded research that required state input. It helped to allocate state resources, and it promoted a research agenda with the goal of improving W-2.

Scope and Content

The series consists of paper files created from 1994 to 2002 at the Madison, Wisconsin office of the Hudson Institute Welfare Policy Center. The office maintained four basic types of files: (1) Meeting files held minutes, correspondence, and handouts from meetings of the three major committees within MEP; (2) Project files documented MEP-related research projects funded and coordinated through the W-2 program; (3) Evaluation files tracked a multitude of independent studies, not expressly linked to MEP; and (4) General files covered a range of subjects related to welfare reform, W-2, and MEP. In addition to these files, the series contains paper copies of presentations delivered by Hudson analysts to audiences in the U.S. and abroad. The series also includes two binders with additional information about W-2.

The meeting files are arranged chronologically by committee. Project files are arranged according to the number assigned each project by the Hudson Institute. The evaluation files are arranged chronologically by scope of study: statewide, county-level, or city-level. General files are arranged alphabetically by folder title.