This MDRC brief is part of a series that documents the implementation of the Change Capital Fund, an economic mobility initiative in New York City. The Change Capital Fund was a consortium of donors who invested in local community development corporations that were pursuing antipoverty strategies that integrated housing, education, and employment services. In this brief, the authors focus on how the Change Capital fund used program data as a tool for continuous learning and improvement, including the specific assistance that grantees received to build their capacity to use data for performance management.

Under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA), public workforce programs were encouraged to make stronger partnerships with TANF. In this report, the Center on Law and Social Policy detailed the findings of a survey conducted in 2016 on the degree of coordination between TANF and workforce programs during the early implementation of WIOA. According to the survey results, state officials were very interested in improving coordination between WIOA and TANF, but only modest changes had taken place. The coordination strategies that states used most often were shared job resource rooms and braided funding, and they used team case management least often.

This toolkit from the Heartland Alliance provides resources targeted toward organizations wanting to engage employers for transitional jobs or subsidized employment programs. These resources will help organizations plan and implement effective job development strategies, build relationships with employers, and serve participants with barriers to employment. The toolkit includes research briefs on six different topics, videos of employers describing how partnering with transitional jobs programs was good for business, and links to additional information by subtopic.

While low-income parents face challenges, many manage to raise children with socio-emotional competence. This policy report from the National Center for Children in Poverty describes what can be learned from these resilient parents, and analyzes programs and policies that promote parents’ and children’s resiliency. The authors find that policies such as increasing access to health and mental health care, providing training in evidence-based parenting skills, and strengthening key safety net programs all contribute to strengthening resiliency in both parents and children.

Nearly 12% of American children will spend at least half of their lives from birth to age 17 living in poverty. This report from the Urban Institute analyzes factors that have helped these persistently poor children achieve economic success. Some of those factors include spending more years in an employed family, spending fewer years in a family headed by someone with a disability, and living in less segregated and disadvantaged neighborhoods. The researchers recommend several strategies to help more persistently poor children achieve economic success, such as subsidized employment for parents and programs to help families move out of disadvantaged neighborhoods.

Career One Stop, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor, provides a directory of Website links to state and national career and labor market information offices. Users can search by state to find a state profile with employment trends data, employment-related resources, and the website link to the state’s labor market information office, if available.

Self-regulation skills, which research suggests are important for goal setting, help individuals achieve employment goals. In this report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, the self-regulation skills that have an impact on employment are discussed, as well as the ways in which environmental factors like poverty can hurt development of these skills. The report also includes advice for practitioners on how to build the self-regulation skills of program participants and highlights employment programs that have integrated skill development opportunities into their programming.

Self-regulation, which is “the act of managing thoughts and feelings to enable goal-directed actions,” is important for all individuals but may be especially critical for adolescents and young adults. This practice brief from the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation discusses research on self-regulation and how caregivers can help support development of adolescent self-regulation, especially for youth who have been exposed to adversity. The brief also gives guidance to programs on how they can integrate supports for adolescents to assist with developing self-regulation abilities.

The Annie E. Casey Foundation hosted this webinar in October 2016; the webinar recording is available online. The webinar is part of a series discussing lessons learned from the Foundation’s Learn and Earn to Achieve Potential (LEAP) initiative, which is working with youth, especially those who have been justice system involved, homeless, or in the child welfare system, to address the challenges that make it difficult for them to achieve degrees or maintain jobs. LEAP sites have aimed to make their services responsive to youth who have experienced trauma, since research shows that suffering extreme stress and adverse experiences in childhood can impair physical development in ways that have long-term consequences. On the webinar, three LEAP sites discussed how they have made their services trauma-responsive.

This post from the Chronicle of Evidence-Based Mentoring is part of a series on toxic stress. In this post, the authors highlight what professional staff need to know about toxic stress to best serve vulnerable youth and families.