The U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Assistance has announced a grant funding opportunity under the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA). Applications are sought for projects designed to prevent, detect, and respond to sexual abuse and sexual harassment in prisons, and to achieve and maintain compliance with PREA standards. Applications are due by April 14, 2020.

The U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Assistance has announced a grant funding opportunity under the Correctional Adult Reentry Education, Employment, and Recidivism Strategies (CAREERRS) Program under the Second Chance Act. Applications are sought to implement or expand education and employment programs that build partnerships with corrections, parole, probation, education, workforce development, and reentry service providers to enhance employment prospects for incarcerated youth and adults reentering the workforce. Grants applications are due by April 27, 2020.

This tip sheet identifies a continuum of activities that engage employers in workforce activities, beginning with how to start a new relationship toward a strategic partnership. Levels of engagement include advising, capacity-building, co-designing, convening, and leading.

This brief identifies challenges for addressing families in rural areas who fall within the child welfare system and who also encounter substance misuse. It also illustrates several challenges that include a lack of family-centered options as well as transportation and technological limitations in addressing the needs of parents with substance abuse. The brief also points out the need for collaboration in rural areas between child welfare agencies and substance use treatment providers.

This research to practice brief identifies a set of established, promising, and developing practices that serve to improve low-income families’ economic well-being comprehensively. The practices cover financial security, workforce development, housing, and case management and highlight research on each area’s benchmarks and measures of success and the organizations that are engaged in these programmatic areas.

Initiating and maintaining improvements in early care and education (ECE) programs can be challenging, due to factors such as staffing shortages, turnover, and ineffective organizational structures. To address this challenge, the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE) funded the Culture of Continuous Learning (CCL) Project, which tests the feasibility of initiating a Breakthrough Series Collaborative (BSC) in child care and Head Start programs that serve children from diverse income and racial/ethnic backgrounds. This OPRE Issue Brief illustrates how and why the BSC is anticipated to support improvements and the factors facilitating long-term change.

The American Public Human Services Association (APHSA) will host a webinar on March 11, 2020 from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. ET to cover how Sonoma County, California changed its service delivery model to improve client outcomes. Discussion from Sonoma County Department of Health Services, IBM, and APHSA representatives will cover changes in information sharing across departments, collaboration in multi-discipline teams, client consent for data sharing, and creation of an integrated data hub to track results.

The National Association of Workforce Development Professionals (NAWDP), in conjunction with Dynamic Works, is hosting a five-part series of fee-based workshops to support career coaches’ professional development. Workshops start on April 1, 2020 at 11:00 a.m. ET and will be held on successive Wednesdays throughout April. NAWDP members and non-members may register for one or more of the workshops.

This Child Trends brief assesses state-level efforts to create data infrastructure and integration of home visiting and early childhood data systems. The brief highlights strategies and examples for state leaders to use in planning for costs of integrating data pertaining to home visiting and other early childhood issues. Decision makers can use this information to answer questions about access to early childhood services and to track the outcomes of children who utilize these services.

This National Governors Association policy brief examines the lessons learned from the Parents and Children Thriving Together: Two-Generation State Policy Network (PACTT Network). Initially convened in 2016, the PACTT Network is a policy academy that created and implemented two-generation strategies to address intergenerational poverty. The policy academy included state representatives from Colorado, Georgia, Minnesota, New Jersey, and Oregon.