This brief from Child Trends reviews characteristics for replicating effective practices for enhancing service delivery. Program replication is often crucial to implementing the most appropriate services for special populations. The key for program reproduction includes learning core intervention components and core implementation components.

This brief from the Urban Institute reviews four key service systems that serve vulnerable families with young children: Early Head Start; the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children; the child welfare system; and the Part C Early Intervention Program. Authors review data on the demographics of infants and toddlers served by these programs.

In 2005, the U.S. Census estimated that 37.0 million people, or 12.6 percent of the population, lived at or below the official poverty threshold. Additionally, 7.7 million were classified as “working poor,” who were at or below the poverty threshold and had worked 27 weeks in the past year. The Bureau of Labor Statistics authored this report on the demographics of the working poor from the 2005 Census data.

The National Center for Children in Poverty is conducting a project called Making “Work Supports” Work. The project is designed to promote policies to support low-wage workers in the workplace. Employment wages supplemented by government work support policies can help support families, and include the Earned Income Tax Credit, child care subsidies, health insurance, food stamps, and housing assistance. This brief provides an overview of the project, and offers data on how work supports can make a difference for low-income families.

President Bush's High Growth Job Training Initiative (HGJTI) is a national effort to encourage the development of market-driven strategies to address workforce challenges. This report, from the Urban Institute, provides an implementation study and evaluation assessment of the program for 20 HGJTI grantees.

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania conducted this study on the recent trends on marriage stability in the United States. While recent data offers conflicting evidence, authors review data, and conclude that marital stability has increased among married couples since the mid-late 1970s.

This paper is through the Institute for Research on Poverty and reviews research on collateral costs and benefits of incarceration on earnings and employment. While the increase in incarceration over the past decades has generated social benefits, the author argues that the negative consequences for society are greater such as the large costs on employment associated with current levels of incarceration.

This paper is from the Economic Policy Institute and provides an overview of why work supports are needed to sustain working families in the United States. Work support benefits can help low-wage workers close the gap between earnings and expenses to support their families. Researchers provide an overview of existing work support programs and offer recommendations for enhancing such programs.

From the Commonwealth Fund, this study provides insights on community health initiatives that seek to serve the uninsured by connecting people to health care services and health insurance. Community health initiatives unite key stakeholders and build on relationships to support the local safety net within the community. Findings from the study show the importance of a state context for community initiatives and challenges in replicating such initiatives.

Researchers at the Department of Human Development, California State University East Bay, conducted this study examining a model of income poverty, material hardship, parenting factors, and child health status to understand how material hardship and parental factors mediate the effects of poverty on child health. Utilizing data from the 2002 National Survey of American Families, researchers found that poverty has an independent effect on health, and its effects are partially explained by material hardship, parental depression and parental behaviors.