The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities recently released an updated report reviewing State government SNAP Web sites. States across the U.S. provide general information to the public on their SNAP programs via the Internet, including information on their application process and State policy manuals. In this report, the CBPP reviews all the States' web pages to determine what information and services they offer. In addition to this, the report provides links to the addresses for each States' SNAP web pages and an overview of the types of information and services that State provides.

MDRC released a report discussing how Career Academics can build college and career exploration programs. MDRC and Bloom Associates developed and piloted a program to help Career Academics, a popular high school reform, build college and career exploration programs for their students. This report presents three key findings and the lessons learned from its implementation in 18 academies in California, Florida, and Georgia.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities recently published their revised version of "Online Services for Key Low-Income Benefit Programs: What States Provide Online with Respect to SNAP, TANF, Child Care Assistance, Medicaid, CHIP, and General Assistance." This report makes available to the public basic program information in these five main State-administered low-income benefit programs for most States. Application forms and data on the number of program participants is provided, as well as links that will provide additional information on eligibility and benefits.

Child Welfare Information Gateway published "Online Resources for State Child Welfare Law and Policy" to provide web addresses for State statutes that are accessible online. These addresses list part of the code for each State and territory that contains the laws addressing child protection, adoption, child welfare, legal guardianship, and services for youth. It also provides web addresses for States' regulation and policy sites, State court rules, Tribal codes, and judicial resources. Information for each State and territory can be accessed on the State Statutes Search page.

The MDRC recently published a report on early findings from a program for housing voucher recipients in New York City. In 2007, New York City's Center for Economic Opportunity launched Opportunity NYC-Work Rewards, a new test of three alternative but related ways of increasing employment and earnings for families who receive Housing Choice Vouchers to subsidize their rent. This report addresses five key findings from the first two and a half years of followup, informing future research on family self-sufficiency. The Work Rewards program will continue to track participants' outcomes through 2013, with future reports including additional information on results.

Child-only cases have become a substantial presence in the United States' TANF caseload, representing a large portion of TANF cases. Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago released a report with the purpose of aiding policy makers as they contemplate modifications to TANF. This report has three goals: to describe child-only policies and explore how these policies create and shape child-only cases; to provide information about the needs of children and adults in households that receive child-only aid; and to situate child-only TANF policy in the context of other relevant policies.

In 2012, the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) launched a major research initiative designed to enhance understanding of how policies and programs can build economic self-sufficiency by increasing employment, wages, labor market skills, and earnings. It is one of three such integrated research projects that extend over three-year periods with a range of activities that are focused on topics related to three themes identified by IRP as key trends in poverty and policy: Economic Self-Sufficiency, Family Change and Poverty, and the Intergenerational Transmission of Poverty.

Based on data reported by more than 3,000 cities and counties across the United States, HUD recently released their report on the national estimate of homelessness for 2012. While the United States was experiencing a historic housing and economic downturn, local communities reported a statistically significant seven percent decline in the number of homeless veterans and individuals experiencing long-term chronic homelessness.

America's children and their families are showing greater resilience and support in the face of rising poverty that has now wiped out the historic financial gains of the 1990s, according to the Foundation for Child Development's annual child well-being index. The New York City-based group announced that overall child well-being is up more than five percent both from 2001 and the index's beginning a generation ago, in 1975. The index is a composite of 28 indicators of both children's environmental and economic environments and their own behaviors.