The Economic Policy Institute published this report, which discusses the recent increase in employment throughout the United States. The report features an interactive tool for viewers to compare any state’s unemployment rate against the rate of the Great Recession period.

This paper provides technical assistance to Health Profession Opportunity Grants (HPOG) programs. The technical assistance discussed in the paper focuses on using data to understand and respond to employer demands, develop career pathways, and more. The paper provides a detailed approach to aid programs in identifying and using labor market information.

The Children’s Bureau and Office of Community Services developed a toolkit entitled “A Financial Empowerment Toolkit for Youth and Young Adults in Foster Care.” This toolkit aims to provide caseworkers, care providers, foster parents, and other adults with strategies and resources to help youth improve their approaches to gaining financial competence.

Published by the Economic Policy Institute, this fact sheet provides readers with estimate unemployment rates in some of the United States’ most populated cities. The report sorts the data by race and ethnicity of individuals living in each of the 12 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) with a Federal Reserve Bank. In addition, it includes illustrative charts and figures for readers to better understand the findings.

This presentation describes findings from Understanding the Dynamics of Disconnection From Employment and Assistance, a research project funded by the Office of Planning, Research & Evaluation (HHS/ACF/OPRE) to better understand how single mothers who are disconnected from both TANF and work get by and what their reasons for disconnection are.  Data was collected through in-depth interviews with 51 mothers; samples were drawn from existing longitudinal studies in Los Angeles, California and Southeast Michigan.

This presentation was given at the 2014 National Association of Welfare Research and Statistics (NAWRS) Annual Workshop.

The Center for Law & Social Policy (CLASP) features different resources aimed at improving services to low-income youth and adults under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA). In addition, they highlight promising state and local strategies and models that align WIOA's goals and help create pathways to postsecondary and economic success for low-skilled workers, youth, and adults.

This resource from the Center for the Developing Child at Harvard University provides links to numerous articles, all related to toxic stress. A variety of articles are provided, all related to reducing toxic stress in children. Links to related content, including a factsheet on toxic stress, can be found as well.

This study assessed the associations between family socio-economic status and single parenthood to predict child executive functions. The study found that families with low socio-economic status with one parent in the home had children who performed less well on executive function tests than children from similarly low socio-economic status families with two parents.

This overview from ACF provides a summary of the current ongoing Early Head Start University Partnership grant program. It contains a link to the programs selected as part of the most recent research grant. The purpose of the grants is to test interventions designed to mitigate the effects of toxic stress on young children. Early Head Start was chosen as a vehicle to test these interventions since it is already designed to meet the needs of families below the poverty line with very young children.

This study, looking at a longitudinal sample of 1,259 low-income children followed from birth, found that that chronic exposure to poverty and the strains of financial hardship were each uniquely predictive of young children's performance on measures of executive functioning. Results suggest a link between poverty-related risk and children's executive functioning.