This report is the second in a series on the implementation and impacts of a novel program that sought to integrate Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education (HMRE) into an employment training program for young adults. To develop and implement the program, Family and Workforce Centers of America, a long-standing provider of employment training in St. Louis, Missouri, enhanced one of its traditional employment training programs to include lessons from a widely implemented relationship education curriculum, along with additional content on workplace relationship skills and personal finances. The integrated program called Career STREAMS (Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services) offered daily workshops for two weeks covering employment-related topics and information on HMRE, weekly booster sessions following the workshops, and individualized case management and job development services. This report documents the study methods, describes program costs and implementation, and presents program impacts after one year.

For much of 2022, the U.S. has enjoyed an unusually strong labor market. Unemployment is historically low, and job creation is well above the level needed to keep pace with population growth. By some measures, such as wage growth, the labor market is especially solid for many lower-wage workers. However, this does not mean that all workers are participating in the labor market at the rates they had prior to the pandemic. This blogpost summarizes research indicating less-educated couples became more likely during the COVID-19 pandemic to include only one labor force participant. The findings indicate that parents of young children report that caregiving is increasingly the reason given for their labor force nonparticipation.

Human-Centered Design (HCD) is a problem-solving and design approach that appears to have potential for promoting effective, efficient, and compassionate service delivery aligned with the mission of the Administration for Children and Families. However, implementation of HCD within human services is relatively novel. This brief presents a definition of HCD that is applicable to the context of human services delivery, differentiates HCD from similar design and problem-solving approaches, and describes how HCD is being used in human services. It also explores what is currently known about evaluation efforts to date including facilitators to HCD implementation.

The Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin at Madison will host a webinar on September 28, 2022 from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. ET which will discuss research on the shift in work and family life among low-income parents. While labor market conditions have shifted significantly in the early 21st century, supports and resources available to families have not always kept pace with needs and demand. This has created particularly challenging circumstances for lower-income households with children and has highlighted the need for policy innovation. This webinar features presentations from researchers who contributed to “Low-Income Families in the Twenty-First Century: Effective Public Policy Responses,” a recent issue of The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences.

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Chief Evaluation Office, in partnership with the Department’s Employment and Training Administration, will host a webinar on October 13, 2022 from 2:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. ET to highlight key findings from the recently released Career Pathways Descriptive and Analytical Project. During the webinar, there will be a screening of four short videos from the Department’s Evidence Coffee Break series, where researchers will share actionable information for practitioners thinking about designing or improving career pathways programs, and hold a live question and answer session with the study team.

Topics covered in the session include:
• How well has the career pathways approach worked?
• Launchpad occupations and why they matter for career pathways programs
• Career advancement from mid-level occupations for women and people of color
• Evidence-based insights for career pathways and other employment and training programs

Early adulthood is a critical life stage for education, employment, relationship formation, and reproductive health, but young adults’ experiences in these areas are highly varied. Using averages to describe youths’ experiences may miss meaningful differences that could alter their developmental trajectories. Understanding these trajectories—and their implications for youth of varying races, ethnicities, and genders—can help researchers, practitioners, and policymakers support young people’s development and ensure greater well-being into their adulthoods. This brief summarizes findings from a new report which reveals different employment pathways taken by young adults from disadvantaged backgrounds through the use of trajectory analysis—a person-based approach that allows clustering people into meaningful patterns based on their employment earnings and the fringe benefits they receive.

The growing effort to define program, job, and credential quality requires investments in P–20W data systems to capture measures of quality and make that information transparent to the public. The National Skills Coalition will host a webinar on September 22, 2022, at 2:00 p.m. ET, which will highlight the importance of state data systems in collecting data on program, job, and credential quality, providing timely information to the public, and using data to ensure equitable attainment of quality jobs and credentials. Two states will discuss their efforts to prioritize data collection and transparent access to information.

UpSkill America — an initiative of the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program — and the Latinos and Society Program at the Aspen Institute, with support from Google.org, launched the Digital Skills and the Latino Workforce research project to better understand the challenges and opportunities that Latino workers and Latino business owners face to succeed in the digital economy. The Aspen Institute will host a webinar on September 22, 2022 from 1:00 p.m. to 2:15 p.m. ET during which participants will learn more about promising approaches to digital upskilling of Latino workers, students, and households implemented by organizations around the country.

The Child Welfare Information Gateway created a five-part podcast series that illustrated ways that states and tribal jurisdictions have supported kinship caregivers. Part 2 of this series focused on Washington State’s approach to providing kinship support services. Topics discussed included:

• Differences in formal and informal kinship caregivers and the differences caseworkers may have to navigate when working with each,
• Cultural considerations caseworkers and others should be aware of when working with rural and Latinx communities and families,
• The importance of building relationships across a community, not just with kinship families, and
• Implementation of one-time stipends for kinship families in Washington State.