This policy brief describes the opportunities for collaboration between SNAP Employment & Training programs and the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. Because both serve overlapping populations, such as able-bodied adults without dependents, states can implement SNAP E&T through existing workforce training programs to overcome participants’ barriers to employment. The report details the benefits and challenges of cooperation, provides examples of states that are currently uniting the two initiatives, and suggests lessons for integration.

This testimony from an Institute Fellow at the Urban Institute was presented to the Subcommittee on Human Resources within the Committee on Ways and Means in the U.S. House of Representatives. The author critiques TANF for not sufficiently reaching children in poverty, spending limited funds outside the original policy goals, and failing to offer training and education for good jobs, among other issues. She recommends TANF improvements such as setting spending floors for core benefits, furthering 21st century skills and education training, and writing in an explicit child poverty reduction goal. These changes, she argues, will help children in poverty and increase parental socioeconomic mobility as TANF originally intended.

A paper from Economic Mobility Pathways discusses the importance of setting high goals and standards when helping families navigate their way out of poverty. Coach-navigator programs that seek to build resiliency and decision making view high expectations as a self-fulfilling prophecy and a crucial step to success for struggling participants. Thus, coaching relationships are most effective when they hold people to ambitious yet achievable standards that participants then willingly work to strive toward.

This brief by the Urban Institute looks at how economic trends and the labor market have changed since the 1970s, when both the labor market and social safety supports were stronger. Because of such changes like fewer work benefits, stagnant wages, and declining labor force participation rates, social safety programs face increasing burdens. Furthermore, the trend toward more outsourced, nonstandard, temporary, and automated work creates further pressures on social safety nets to provide benefits traditionally obtained through stable employment. Some potential solutions include portable benefits for contractors or part-time workers, laws that require minimum benefit levels, state-operated social insurance programs, prorated unemployment benefits, and programs to make the work requirements of safety net programs easier to fulfill.

Positive Youth Development (PYD) is a capacity-building approach to program interventions that aims to promote soft skills, positive relationships, community involvement, family-school-work linkages, and academic engagement among youth to create a fully supportive and safe environment. The PILOT tool, developed by Child Trends, works on implementing those strategies concretely in the workforce for youth in primarily middle skill jobs. After working with five organizations to integrate the PILOT tool into their workplaces, Child Trends found that it not only improves the work outcomes of vulnerable youth populations and generates internal and external conversations about PYD, but that many places that practice these initiatives do so without formal recognition or prompting and thus go unfunded. Child Trends expects to further help program stakeholders, leaders, and funders in the next phase of their program when they look into how to systematize PYD policies.

The Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) from the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) encourages local workforce development boards to create and utilize Youth Committees to provide youth services effectively. New provisions in the requirements allow boards greater flexibility in naming Youth Committees from previous existing youth councils. This posting compiles webinars and a success guide from the DOL’s Division of Youth Services to help stakeholders learn more about and implement their own Youth Committees to bring experts together, generate ideas and discussions, foster partnerships, and ultimately meet the needs of local youth.

A seven-year government project that researched ways to strengthen social services using principles from behavioral science, called Behavioral Insights to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS), recently ended and published a case study based on their field research. This workbook is designed to teach students and field practitioners about behavioral design and methodology. It provides information, exercises, and worksheets and asks readers to read first about different behavioral principles and then about a problem with a tax credit program. Using behavioral science, the publication works through the issue, proposes solutions, and ends with guided discussion questions for readers to ask themselves and their case study group. Questions pertain to readers’ newfound knowledge and insight into how to use behavioral principles to increase the efficacy of their own service provision in the future.

This brief from the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation is aimed at practitioners interested in helping clients reach self-sufficiency by focusing on goal-making abilities. The brief describes the importance of the ability to set and achieve goals and what, when, and how to measure to determine a program's ability to help its participants with this need. Specific real-world program examples are highlighted throughout the brief.

This report comments on the effectiveness of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Emergency Fund (TANF EF) in creating subsidized employment and suggests more subsidized job creation to aid low-income families and weather economic downturns. Subsidized employment that offers temporary government-funded work has been widely proven to be beneficial in providing income support, increasing employment, boosting wages, and improving child support and recidivism numbers. TANF EF was particularly effective because it gave states flexibility to administer funds as they saw fit, enabling them to adapt to specific local contexts and create targeted interventions. The author calls for more subsidized employment programs with flexibility, tailored approaches based on program purpose, sustainable funding streams, and built-in triggers to adapt to changing economic conditions like recessions.

The Health Profession Opportunity Grants Program (HPOG 2.0) provides funding for education and training initiatives to help TANF recipients gain skills for in-demand health care professions. This report is part of an ongoing series that describes the flexible programs and services states offer, catalogues the characteristics of participating individuals, and evaluates program outcomes. Thus far, one-third of participants took basic skills training and about two-thirds of those participants started health care training. Half of participants nationwide earned professional certifications and started or were promoted in a health care job. While some supportive services like case management were widely used, others like job placement or multiple certification services were underutilized. With five years of curriculum goals, HPOG will continue to publish future reports as the program progresses.