This research-to-practice brief highlights data from the 2009 National Household Travel Survey. Data indicates that low-income households spend a higher proportion of their income on transportation expenses. This disproportionately affects African Americans and Hispanics, who experience the highest rates of poverty. Interestingly, this brief explains that low-income individuals experience transportation differently, depending on the city in which they reside. In Los Angeles and Atlanta, low-income populations have shorter travel radiuses between home and work than the average population. In New York, this trend is the opposite – individuals in poverty are more likely to travel further distances to find work. These trends and challenges have implications for all urban residents, which seem likely to persist in the face of rising transportation costs.

This blog post highlights the resource section of the Department of Labor’s CareerOneStop Web site. It was designed to assist users in better accessing resources that coincide with their needs. The Web site offers assistance to anyone with career, training, or job needs.

This is the first of two messages from the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Office of Special Needs Assistance Programs and highlights recent progress in combatting family homelessness and HUD’s future priorities. The resource provides practitioners and stakeholders with steps they can take to end family homelessness by 2020. These actions include using data to evaluate resources, maximizing emergency shelters, eliminating barriers, and tailoring assistance to the unique needs of families.

This video from the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s KIDS COUNT Data Center shows how the data center provides critical information about children and families to stakeholders, including federal and state legislators, advocates, activists, journalists, and community members. The data can be sorted by state, county, city, congressional district, school district, and nationwide. The KIDS COUNT Data Center empowers its users to make a difference in the lives of families and children across the country.

This post, published on July 1, 2015, marks the day that many of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) provisions begin to take effect. The goals of the joint vision between the Departments of Health and Human Services, Labor, and Education are to: ensure the needs of business and workers drive workforce solutions, guarantee American Job Centers provide excellent customer service to jobseekers and employers, and have the workforce system support strong regional economies and play an active role in community and economic development.

For several decades, obtaining a General Educational Development (GED) certificate was the most commonly recognized and widely available High School Equivalency (HSE) option in the U.S. But since January 2014, the content and process for obtaining an HSE credential in the U.S. has changed significantly. There are new state-endorsed equivalency options for individuals, and these changes, along with modifications to the GED, have profound implications for individuals seeking an HSE credential, as well as for postsecondary institutions and employers. This report explains the issues and provides practitioners with improvement strategies for their own programs.

This report from the Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education (OCTAE) examines the implementation of OCTAE's correctional education reentry model at three demonstration sites: Barton Community College in Kansas, Lancaster Lebanon Intermediate Unit 13 in Pennsylvania, and Western Technical College in Wisconsin. It also identifies lessons for linking facility-based and community-based reentry education programs. The study showed that focusing on transitions in and out of correctional facilities and providing career pathways programs may significantly enable incarcerated individuals to continue their education and prepare for better jobs.

Disadvantaged U.S. workers with limited work experience often have difficulty finding and keeping gainful employment. Targeted employment and training interventions can help this population rise up in the labor market and improve their employment and earning potential. The Employment Strategies for Low-Income Adults Evidence Review (ESER) is a review of research on employment and training programs for low-income individuals. The review aims to identify programs and services that help low-income adults get and keep jobs and become self-sufficient.

This report, from the National Skills Coalition and the State Workforce and Education Alignment Project, explains how States can create dashboards to help State policymakers assess key outcomes across their State’s education and workforce programs, and in turn, set workforce policies that help residents get jobs while providing employers with skilled workers. The report provides States with examples from successful dashboards and with guidance to create their own tailored dashboards.

This report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) addresses the significant impact of the criminal justice system, both on individuals directly challenged in employment searches, and also on the U.S. labor market and economy as a whole. Over 70 million American adults have a criminal record that may show up in a background check. This number disproportionately impacts people of color, especially in communities already disadvantaged by unemployment. Now, with the job market making a recovery after the recession, an opportunity exists to adopt and implement effective strategies to expand employment outcomes for people with criminal backgrounds and reduce the number of people caught in the criminal justice system.