This brief outlines how New York City’s Human Resources Administration (HRA) successfully restructured its upfront assessment process for individuals receiving Cash Assistance by utilizing data-driven reflection. In particular, HRA used a method called Learn, Innovate, Improve, an approach that supports rapid agency changes and ongoing improvement through the incorporation of data-informed reflection into the process of evaluating and refining solutions. HRA found that implementing this collaborative, evidence-based decision-making technique is both feasible and effective.

Though the tech industry offers opportunities for high-quality, rewarding jobs, traditional pipelines of workers seldom meet employers’ growing demands. Meanwhile, workers with tech aptitude have found it challenging to break into the industry if they lack formal credentials or direct job experience. In recent years, one promising solution for this mismatch has been registered apprenticeship.

The Urban Institute will host a discussion on June 22, 2022 from 3:00 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. ET where employers, apprentices, and educators will share what they learned about launching tech apprenticeship programs—including an innovative degree-based apprenticeship led by a consortium of historically Black colleges and universities—and discuss where the field is headed.

This evidence snapshot summarizes what rigorous research tells us about 17 interventions that used subsidized employment or transitional jobs as their primary service and the interventions’ impacts on earnings, employment, the receipt of public benefits, and education and training. The data come from high- or moderate-quality studies that began between 2004 and 2015 and were reviewed by the Pathways to Work Evidence Clearinghouse. The snapshot can guide program administrators, policymakers, researchers, and the general public on how they can apply the evidence to their context and the questions that matter to them.

In response to food insecurity’s significance and the opportunity costs of not comprehensively addressing it, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Food Research & Action Center embarked on an Assessment of the Landscape of Hunger and Its Solutions in New Jersey. This statewide assessment of New Jersey’s existing food access and hunger landscape aims to inform state and local policymakers, state agency leaders, community and nonprofit groups, philanthropic organizations, leaders in the private sector, and community members about which policies, systems changes, cross-sector outreach, and programmatic initiatives, if implemented in the coming years, would result in the most significant gains in food security.

To serve jobseekers effectively, employment and training programs may need to incorporate essential supportive services. These three Workforce System Strategies resources – Local Workforce Development Boards and Child Care, Evaluation of SNAP Employment and Training Pilots, and Implementing Healthcare Career Pathway Training Programs in Rural Settings – document supportive services such as childcare, training materials, transportation assistance, rental assistance, and work clothing to increase jobseeker abilities to access, prepare for, and obtain employment.

This brief is designed to help state apprenticeship expansion teams and workforce system partners understand the structure of each other's work, consider five dimensions of system alignment, and explore strategies to strengthen alignment. These dimensions are strategic planning, policy, and governance; business engagement and Registered Apprenticeship Program development; apprentice recruitment and support; funding; and data and outcomes. The report also includes a System Alignment Checklist, which is a tool to help states identify areas of strength and opportunities to better align the Registered Apprenticeship and workforce development systems.

The U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration, Office of Workforce Investment will host a webinar on June 21, 2022 from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. ET which will highlight successful initiatives to foster Recovery-Friendly Workplaces. It is part of a series on the role of the workforce system in serving individuals with substance use disorder. Guest speakers from Recovery Friendly Workplace initiatives in New Hampshire and Rhode Island will discuss how those initiatives benefit communities, businesses, and the lives of individuals. This webinar will also focus on the role of the public workforce system in implementing these initiatives.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families (ACF), the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), and the U.S. Department of Education (ED) co-hosted a webinar on May 25, 2022 to provide an overview of registered apprenticeships, share available resources to develop and support early care and education (ECE) apprenticeship programs, and highlight successful national, state, and local models.

Katie Hamm, ACF Deputy Assistant Secretary for Early Childhood Development, spoke about the importance of bringing all three agencies together to address critical shortages in the ECE workforce, which is still at 89% of pre-pandemic levels. These shortages impact families’ ability to go to work, as well as children’s access to early learning opportunities. Other speakers included Katherine Neas, Deputy Assistant Secretary, ED Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, and Wendy Chun-Hoon, Director of the DOL Women’s Bureau.

The American Rescue Plan temporarily increased the child tax credit (CTC) in 2021, including extending the credit to families who had not previously filed tax returns. The Internal Revenue Service automatically sent monthly payments of the CTC to families that had filed a tax return in 2019 or 2020. This report reviews the work of the Birth through Eight Strategy for Tulsa, an initiative to find low-income families who were likely to miss out on receiving the CTC. It also identifies how Tulsa’s existing network of service navigators worked to connect families eligible for the credit with tax preparation services to claim the CTC.

About 20 percent of U.S. American children grow up in poverty, and family income during early childhood is strongly associated with educational attainment and other social and economic outcomes. It can be difficult to separate the effects of family resources, however, from other aspects of a child’s early life, including family structure and stability, parenting styles, and the qualities of a neighborhood and schools. This research brief examines the effectiveness of unrestricted cash support for families facing economic hardship by estimating the long-run causal effects of cash transfers immediately after the birth of a first child.