The Departments of Labor (DOL), Health and Human Services (DHHS), and Housing and Urban Development (HUD) have issued a letter to their respective customers encouraging partnerships among the network of state and local youth service and workforce development providers, human service agencies, and public housing agencies to develop summer jobs programs for needy and at-risk youth that provide employment, educational experiences, and essential skills such as financial literacy and time management.

The Brookings Institution released an interactive map in which users may explore EITC take-up rates at the county level nationwide. Darker colors indicate higher value, while grey shading indicates unavailable data. According to this tool, the southeast part of the country provides the highest EITC take-up rates.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development recently allocated $120 million in rental assistance to State housing agencies to prevent homelessness and unnecessary institutionalization for people with disabilities. HUD's support of these State agencies is made possible through the Section 811 Project Rental Assistance program, which enables persons with disabilities who earn less than 30 percent of their area's median income to live in integrated mainstream settings.

This brief focuses on the analysis of merged national-level SSI data and TANF data from the 26 states that report to the Office of Family Assistance (OFA) on their full TANF caseload. It found, counter to popular narratives, that the overlap between the two programs was small. It also found that TANF recipients who applied for SSI were not at particularly high risk of losing their TANF benefits. Finally, it found that medical award rates among TANF recipients who applied for SSI were comparable to that of SSI applicants who had not recently received TANF, once important age differences were taken into account. (author abstract)

Child Trends recently released a research brief that identifies and outlines promising approaches to reduce early childbearing among Latino adolescents. This work included a review of research studies, a scan of intervention programs, focus groups with adolescents, and interviews with parents, program designers, and program staff, as well as analyses of national databases. The authors synthesize the results across these various research methods to identify major findings and implications for teen pregnancy prevention efforts for Latinos.

This brief provides an overall summary of the lessons learned from the TANF-SSI Disability Transition Project. It brings together material spread across other documents in a concise format, and it also offers new insights from state-level data analyses that largely back up the conclusions drawn from federal data. (author abstract) 

This report describes the evaluation design for the HPOG National Implementation Evaluation. The design focuses on the 27 non-tribal HPOG grantees and addresses: how health professions training programs are being implemented; changes to the service delivery system associated with program implementation; individual-level outputs and outcomes; and what key components and factors appear necessary or seem likely to contribute to the success of the programs. The evaluation involves three related analyses: a Descriptive Implementation Study, a Systems Change Analysis, and an Outcome Study. The report was written as part of the HPOG Implementation, Systems and Outcome Project and the HPOG National Implementation Evaluation, which are both led by Abt Associates in partnership with the Urban Institute. (author abstract)

The U.S. Census Bureau recently released this report that states that, as of Fall 2012, more than 50 million U.S. adults (about 25 percent of the adult population) had received a professional certification, license, or educational certificate that was not a degree awarded by a college or university. Of the awardees, some 34 million had a professional certification of license, 7 million had an educational certificate, and 12 million had received both a professional certification or license and an educational certificate.

The Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation released the HPOG Annual Report to highlight information regarding the program after its second year of operation. The report provides an overview of HPOG grantees, characteristics of participants, activities in which participants were engaged, training and employment outcomes, and how grantee programs continued to evolve in the second year of the program. The report was developed as part of the HPOG Implementation, Systems, and Outcome Project, which is being led by Abt Associates in partnership with the Urban Institute.