The Women and Poverty Public Education Initiative (WPPEI), established by the University of Wisconsin Women's Studies Consortium Outreach Office in 1994, developed a collaborative outreach scholarship model that paired women from the poverty community with women's studies faculty from universities in eight Wisconsin communities to study the effects of welfare reform on those most directly impacted by it. This paper explains how this model was enacted in a longitudinal in-depth interview study conducted with 160 women transitioning off welfare in Wisconsin between 1997 and 2000, the first few years of Wisconsin Works (W-2), Wisconsin's welfare reform. Results from the study are analyzed with an eye toward underscoring the effectiveness of using a collaborative outreach model as a way to gather data that is missing from other similar studies and to bring the voices of women living in poverty into policy debates.