The Office of Community Services awarded 18 Assets for Independence (AFI) grants totaling more than $3.9 million to community-based organizations and government agencies, which will provide low-income individuals and families with access to Individual Development Accounts (IDAs) as well as training on financial education. Every saved dollar deposited into an IDA by a participant is matched and enables participants to save to acquire assets such as a first home, a small business for self-employment, or post-secondary education or training.

In the context of a public safety net focused on limiting dependency and encouraging participation in the labor market, policymakers and researchers are especially interested in individuals who face obstacles to finding and keeping jobs. The Enhanced Services for the Hard-to-Employ (HtE) Demonstration and Evaluation Project was a 10-year study that evaluated innovative strategies aimed at improving employment and other outcomes for groups who face serious barriers to employment. The project was sponsored by the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, with additional funding from the U.S. Department of Labor. This report describes the HtE programs and summarizes the final results for each program. Additionally, it presents information for three sites from the ACF-sponsored Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) project where hard-to-employ populations were also targeted.

Three of the eight models that are described here led to increases in employment. Two of the three — large-scale programs that provided temporary, subsidized "transitional" jobs to facilitate entry into the workforce for long-term welfare recipients in one program and for ex-prisoners in the other — produced only short-term gains in employment, driven mainly by the transitional jobs themselves. The third one — a welfare-to-work program that provided unpaid work experience, job placement, and education services to recipients with health conditions — had longer-term gains, increasing employment and reducing the amount of cash assistance received over four years. Promising findings were also observed in other sites. An early-childhood development program that was combined with services to boost parents’ self-sufficiency increased employment and earnings for a subgroup of the study participants and increased the use of high-quality child care; the program for ex-prisoners mentioned above decreased recidivism; and an intervention for low-income parents with depression produced short-term increases in the use of in-person treatment. But other programs — case management services for low-income substance abusers and two employment strategies for welfare recipients — revealed no observed impacts.

While these results are mixed, some directions for future research on the hard-to-employ emerged:

• The findings from the evaluations of transitional jobs programs have influenced the design of two new federal subsidized employment initiatives, which are seeking to test approaches that may achieve longer-lasting effects.
  
  
• The HtE evaluation illustrates some key challenges that early childhood education programs may face when adding self-sufficiency services for parents, and provides important lessons for implementation that can guide future two-generational programs for low-income parents and their young children.
  
  
• Results from the HtE evaluation suggest future strategies for enhancing and adapting an intervention to help parents with depression that may benefit low-income populations.
  
  
• Evidence from the HtE evaluation of employment strategies for welfare recipients along with other research indicates that combining work-focused strategies with treatment or services may be more promising than using either strategy alone, especially for people with disabilities and behavioral health problems.

(author abstract)

Many parents receiving assistance from Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) face serious barriers to employment. Sometimes called the “hard to employ,” these parents typically require enhanced assistance to prepare for, find, and keep jobs. Health issues and disability, substance abuse, criminal records, domestic violence, limited education, and responsibilities for disabled children or parents all stand in the way. Federal TANF rules influence state policies toward the hard to employ. Yet states vary considerably in approaches to serving this population. (author abstract)

Nearly a decade has passed since Indiana began planning its approach to welfare reform. In January 1994 Governor Evan Bayh announced an initial plan, called the “Partnership for Personal Responsibility.” The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services approved a revised plan in December 1994 and, in May 1995, Indiana randomly assigned its entire welfare caseload (more than 60,000 families) to one of two groups for purposes of evaluation. The first was subject to the State’s new welfare reform rules and the other to its previous welfare policies. The goals of the program, as specified in 1995, were to increase clients’ employment and decrease their reliance on welfare, to make work more financially rewarding than public assistance, and to encourage responsible parenting.

Since 1995, Indiana’s welfare reform goals and approach have been consistent. Under Governor Frank O’Bannon, the Family and Social Services Administration (FSSA) made policy changes in 1997 and 2000 intended to strengthen welfare reform, but these changes were consistent with the program’s original goals and most of the original policies remain in place. Relatively minor changes were required as a result of enactment of welfare reform at the federal level, in the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA).

Despite the consistency over time in goals and approach, both Indiana’s welfare caseload and the State’s economy have fluctuated substantially since 1995. Indiana’s welfare caseload dropped precipitously in the early phase of welfare reform and continued falling until mid-2000, when it began to increase sharply. The economy has gone from very low levels of unemployment in the early years of welfare reform to a current recession and State budget difficulties.

In the face of these changes, and given the time that has passed, it is important to assess Indiana’s approach to welfare reform. The key question is: How has Indiana’s welfare reform program affected participating families, and have those effects changed over time? Especially relevant given the current budget situation is a second, related question: Has the program been cost-effective?

The answer, provided in this report, is that the program has had real effects on participants, increasing employment and decreasing their use of welfare. The size of these effects is generally in the middle range of impacts found for welfare reform programs in other states. Indiana’s program also has been cost-effective, with the savings in welfare payments outweighing the costs of providing additional child care and employment services. The observed impacts, however, have not on average resulted in increased income for families. By that measure, therefore, the program has not made families substantially better off financially. (author abstract)

*managed by OPRE, funded by Indiana Family and Social Services Administration

In recent decades, there has been a widening gap between higher rates of marital instability for economically disadvantaged couples and lower rates for nondisadvantaged couples. In addition, out-of-wedlock birth rates have risen, while evidence has grown that children fare better, on average, when raised by both of their parents in stable low-conflict households. All of these trends were important rationales for the development of a federal Healthy Marriage Initiative (HMI) within the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. Through grants to a range of state and local agencies, the HMI emphasizes provision of marriage education, a voluntary preventive service aimed at providing interested couples with skills and information that may help them to develop and sustain successful marriages and relationships.

In this chapter, we introduce the Supporting Healthy Marriage (SHM) evaluation — the first large-scale, multisite experiment that tests marriage education programs for low-income married couples with children. The SHM conceptual framework recognizes multiple sources of relationship strength and weakness, and the project’s program model has followed this frame-work closely in adapting the content and delivery of marriage education services for low-income married parents. Eight sites (with some sites spanning multiple organizations) are operating SHM programs around the country. SHM is testing a relatively intensive and comprehensive form of marriage education designed specifically for low-income families. Its year-long program model packages a series of marriage education workshops with additional family support, including case management, supportive services, and referrals to outside services as needed. The evaluation includes two interrelated substudies — one focusing on sites’ experiences in implementing the SHM model and the other measuring program impacts on marital quality and stability, child well-being, and a range of other outcomes. (author abstract)

This report is a technical supplement to the 15-month impact report for the Building Strong Families (BSF) evaluation (Wood et al. 2010). It provides additional detail about the research design (Chapter I), analytic methods (Chapter II), and variable construction (Chapters III and IV) that were used for the 15-month analysis. Chapter V of this report provides a discussion of the subgroup analysis that was conducted. The full set of impact results generated as part of this analysis is included in the appendices of this volume. (author abstract)

Increasing education among low-income parents is a vital component of policies to improve families’ economic status. Educational attainment matters: between 1979 and 2005, wages for those with college and advanced degrees rose by 22 and 28 percent, respectively, while wages for high school graduates remained stagnant and wages for high school dropouts fell by 16 percent. Overall, people who complete an associate’s degree or certificate program earn more than those with just a high school diploma or general educational development (GED) certificate, and those who complete even one year of college earn more than those without the additional education. But only a third of low-wage, low-income workers with children have more than a high school diploma and another third are high school dropouts. Moreover, the strong association between postsecondary education and higher earnings does not necessarily mean that facilitating access to higher education among low-income adults will lead to earnings gains, particularly considering that many lack recent or successful school experiences. (author abstract)

A central component of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program is its emphasis on work. Adult TANF recipients, with some exceptions, must participate in work activities as a condition of receiving cash benefits. This brief focuses on the federal work requirements and state strategies for meeting them, especially since passage of the Deficit Reduction Act of 2005, the recession that began in December 2007 and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The brief documents the multiple strategies that states use to meet the participation rate requirements. (author abstract)

Over the past two decades, federal and state policymakers have dramatically reshaped the nation’s system of cash welfare assistance for low-income families. Through national legislation and state-initiated reform and experimentation, policymakers transformed Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), which became Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) in 1996. During this period, state approaches to welfare reform have varied considerably. Nevertheless, almost all reform efforts have encouraged adult welfare recipients to work more and, as a result, to reduce their families’ long-term reliance on welfare benefits. In addition, many state welfare pro-grams have incorporated financial incentives that have encouraged work and supplemented the incomes of employed TANF recipients, and have also experimented with ways to help workers—employed TANF recipients and those who leave the TANF rolls with employment—retain employment and advance in the labor market. (author abstract)