This guide from the Child Welfare Information Gateway is designed to help practitioners implement Family Group Decision-Making (FGDM). In FGDM, child welfare agencies actively engage families in developing a case plan to ensure the safety of their children. There are six elements that are critical to success in FGDM: having an independent facilitator, recognizing that the family is the key decision-making partner in the child welfare process, including private family time, prioritizing the case plan that the family develops, providing services to implement that case plan, and following up afterward until the desired outcomes have been achieved. The guide describes the challenges involved with implementing FGDM, and provides strategies and resources for overcoming those challenges.

This Urban Institute report, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation describes the first year of the second round of the Health Profession Opportunity Grants Program (HPOG 2.0). Under HPOG 2.0, TANF participants receive education and training for high-demand, high-wage healthcare occupations. In this first year report, the authors describe the 21 grantees, the services they offer, and the characteristics of participants. HPOG 2.0 programs enrolled 5,150 participants in Year One and offered training in 66 different occupations, and the majority of participants were women with at least one child. Many participants remained in training after Year One, but 19% had started jobs or received a promotion.

This report and interactive maps from the Brookings Institution illustrate how geography affects people’s sense of hope about their futures. Without hope, people can suffer from health problems and substance abuse issues that shorten lifespans. The researchers are attempting to see where low-income white and minority individuals are the least optimistic about the future. Three different sets of interactive maps show how each state rates on optimism, worry, and pain for poor non-Hispanic white individuals and poor minorities. Overall, minorities fared worse on all three measures in states with lower minority populations, and white individuals fared worse in Appalachian states and in the heartland.

This series from MDRC explores what networks of organizations can accomplish in communities. The researchers are focusing on nine Chicago neighborhoods, combining social network analysis with in-depth interviews to see how community organizations can collaborate with one another on local improvement projects. Specifically, the researchers are studying how networks affect the power of individual community groups, how networks promote effective partnerships, how those partnerships can unite people from diverse communities, and how those networks change over time. The first two parts of the series provide an introduction to social network analysis and illustrate the power in networks of community organizations.

Employment is crucial for preventing and ending youth homelessness, and programs need to be well-designed and implemented to help these youth find and keep jobs. The Heartland Alliance is hosting this webinar to share policy approaches, program models, and best practices aimed at helping youth experiencing homelessness find employment. Speakers will include representatives from the National Alliance to End Homelessness, A Way Home America, and Heartland Alliance’s National Initiatives, as well as practitioners from New Moms/Bright Endeavors in Chicago and Daybreak Dayton/Lindy & Company in Dayton. The webinar will take place on Wednesday, September 27th from 2:30 to 4:00 PM EST.

This study from the Wisconsin HOPE Lab was designed to help practitioners and policymakers understand the extent of food and housing insecurity at different community colleges across the country. The researchers analyzed data from 33,000 community college students at 70 community colleges in 24 states. They found that two-thirds of students were food insecure, about half of students were housing insecure, and about 13-14% were homeless. There was very little geographic variation in the hunger and homelessness that community college students experienced, but former foster youth experienced homelessness at a higher rate than other community college students. The researchers recommend improvements in policy and practice to ensure the basic needs of community college students are met.

This Prosperity Now brief describes how three types of housing organizations have started to integrate financial capability services into their housing programs. Those housing organizations include affordable housing developers, public housing authorities, and housing counseling organizations, and they most frequently offered financial education or one-on-one financial counseling and coaching. Through interviews, the authors found that these housing organizations are started to offer financial capability services either in-house or through partnerships, but they face challenges in implementing those services. Lack of staff capacity, the need for training, and having enough resources available to offer financial capability services are the challenges that housing organizations face. Despite these challenges, housing organizations stated that helping clients proactively address their financial concerns can reduce the need for evictions.

This Jobs for the Future brief details the Opportunity Works initiative, which funded seven community-based organizations across the country to develop education and training programs for youth who are disconnected from school and work. Halfway through the three-year grant period the organizations already had learned several lessons, such as the importance of helping youth see why they need careers, allowing enough time for youth to build rapport with their coaches, and creating partnerships with colleges to help youth complete postsecondary education. The brief also includes a summary of each site’s progress in the initiative thus far and profiles of youth participants.

Upgrading America’s transportation and physical infrastructure is a bipartisan priority, and also an opportunity to provide millions of jobs to Americans who are unemployed or underemployed. This National Skills Coalition report describes the education and training policies that are necessary to prepare enough skilled workers to meet the demand that a large investment in infrastructure would create. The authors recommend creating and expanding sector partnerships in the infrastructure industry, creating incentives for apprenticeships and work-based learning, and funding support services to ensure that work-based learning participants are fully ready to work. This report also includes examples of successful transportation sector partnerships from Seattle and Central Iowa.

This Brookings Institution report provides an in-depth analysis of 24 million working-age adults who were not in the labor force in 2016. The researchers examined the reasons why these adults were not working, who they were living with, and how they were making ends meet. Women without a high school diploma were the largest group of Americans who were not in the labor force, and both men and women cited illness, disability, being a student, or retiring early as the reasons why they were not working. Nearly 75% of adults who were not participating in the workforce lived in a household with earned income, and the most common living arrangements were living with a spouse or a parent.