The Cities for Financial Empowerment Fund released the results of an evaluation of a three-year investment in free, one-on-one financial counseling to residents in five cities. This project was based on a model that originated in New York City, in which individuals in financial trouble receive personalized help from a professionally trained counselor through their local government. Bloomberg Philanthropies partnered with Denver, Lansing, Nashville, Philadelphia, and San Antonio to see how they could replicate this model. In each city, the local government implemented the model and contracted with a nonprofit partner to provide counseling services. Over 22,000 individuals received financial counseling, and they were able to achieve positive financial outcomes like opening bank accounts, reducing debt, improving credit, and establishing emergency savings. Each city also found sources of public funding to sustain the program beyond the Bloomberg Philanthropies grant.

Community colleges have the potential to provide low-cost, high-quality training to students if they partner with local business and industry leaders. This toolkit from the Brookings Institution provides practical strategies for community colleges to use to build and maintain partnerships with local business leaders. The toolkit has three sections: creating a navigator for industry partners, key characteristics of productive partnerships, and practical steps for building relationships. Each section has recommendations that are based on research and conversations with business and industry leaders, community college leaders, and intermediaries.

Families living in emergency shelters may experience instability, such as parents becoming separated from their children or partners. This Abt Associates report, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation details these family transitions. Using data from 2,282 homeless families who participated in the Family Options Study, the researchers found that about 30 percent of families living in shelters reported separation from at least one family member. Even 20 months after leaving a shelter, 24% of families reported that at least one of their children was not living with them. The researchers recommend that emergency shelters should consider whether their current policies allow families to stay together in shelters, and to realize that families are dynamic and their needs may change over time.

This MDRC brief is part of a series that documents the implementation of the Change Capital Fund, an economic mobility initiative in New York City. The Change Capital Fund was a consortium of donors who invested in local community development corporations that were pursuing antipoverty strategies that integrated housing, education, and employment services. In this brief, the authors focus on how the Change Capital fund used program data as a tool for continuous learning and improvement, including the specific assistance that grantees received to build their capacity to use data for performance management.

When TANF became law in 1996, welfare recipients were required to engage in work participation activities, and states were required to have 50 percent of their TANF cases meet these participation requirements. The intention of requiring individuals to engage in these activities was to assist individuals in gaining employment and becoming economically self-sufficient. However, the rates at which TANF recipients meet the participation requirements and transition into employment consistent with economic self-sufficiency are disappointingly low. This chapter provides an overview that begins with a more detailed characterization of these issues to provide a context that highlights the importance of the questions this research seeks to answer. The data used in this research essentially constitutes a census of first-time TANF recipients in Utah, and some of the aspects of this data set are subsequently described. Finally, the TANF population is compared to the general population in Utah for the purpose of illustrating the significant differences between these populations.

Senate Resolution 2013-62 (Appendix A) directed the Legislative Budget and Finance Committee to consider the effect of major federal and state programs in assisting low-income families to achieve self-sufficiency and reduce the number of families living in poverty. In particular, the Committee was asked to determine if and how such programs mitigate the “cliff effect.” “Cliff effects” occur when program benefits are not phased out on a sliding scale basis, or increased earnings are not sufficient to cover the full cost of the lost benefit. With one exception, the Committee focused on programs available to all that apply and meet eligibility requirements: TANF (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), SNAP/Food Stamps (Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program), several federal tax credits, and Pennsylvania’s Special Tax Forgiveness Program. The one exception, the Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF), is a discretionary federal program offering child care subsidies for low- income families, with the number of eligible individuals served limited by available funding.

This report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities provides evidence to dispute the idea that low-income assistance programs discourage work. Critics of assistance programs argue that people receiving assistance get more money from not working and receiving government benefits than they would from working. The authors found that working is almost always more financially beneficial than not working. Workers in poverty have a greater incentive to work more hours or at higher wages than other workers, since their marginal tax rate is lower. Even workers just above the poverty line still gain substantially from working additional hours. Work pays because social safety net programs have changed over the past two decades to reduce benefits for people who are not working, while increasing tax credits for people who are working.

It has been 20 years since the U.S. Congress passed welfare reform, and throughout these two decades, Maryland has provided cash assistance to families whose incomes do not meet their basic needs. In this way, the Temporary Cash Assistance program (TCA, Maryland’s welfare program) provides a valuable service to vulnerable families. For most families, however, this is a short-term solution to the challenges of living in poverty. The annual report series, Life after Welfare, examines outcomes of families who left cash assistance. The series focuses on families’ characteristics, employment and earnings outcomes, and the receipt of other public benefits. The 2016 update includes a sample of 11,737 families who left the TCA program between January 2004 and March 2016. Trends were examined over time by separating these families’ case closures into three cohorts: (1) Mid-2000s Recovery—a declining caseload between January 2004 and March 2007; (2) Great Recession Era—an increasing caseload between April 2007 and December 2011; and (3) Great Recession Recovery—a declining caseload between January 2012 and March 2016.

The goal of workforce development efforts serving individuals in poverty is to provide them with the skills and credentials they need to increase their earnings in the labor market and advance to self-sufficiency. It is important for workforce stakeholders to understand that low-income families’ household income is often partly comprised of public benefits (such as supports for housing, child care, and health care) that phase out as increases in earnings are made through higher wages and/or more hours on the job. Rapid phaseouts of benefits – what are known as “benefits cliffs” – can have the effect of canceling out large portions of a family’s earnings gains, or even make a family substantially worse off from a self-sufficiency standpoint that prior to its earnings gains. This latest research by the Seattle Jobs Initiative examines the impact of benefits cliffs on low-income Washington families. The goal is to support workforce and social service providers in their efforts to better help these families to navigate the potential loss of benefits as they assist them to make earnings gains.

This Urban Institute blog post summarizes recent studies that show that students attending two-year colleges are more likely to be food insecure than other adults, especially during recessions. In 2008, 21.8% of households with two-year college students experienced food insecurity, compared to 14.6% of all households. The authors cannot identify specific reasons why two-year college students experience food insecurity at higher rates, but possibilities include reduced family support, the loss of a part-time job, or increased tuition. Most college students are not eligible for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, so the authors recommend that states consider expanding eligibility for SNAP to more college students enrolled in educational programs.