This article from Child Trends offers information on how professional development is crucial to helping youth workers succeed in the workplace. Additionally, authors identify core competencies for youth workers and highlight professional development training delivery models.

In 2002, the number of prisoners returning to society was 600,000 per year. This report provides an overview of how three cities, Jacksonville, Memphis, and Washington D.C., were dealing with reentry difficulties prior to joining the Ready4Work Initiative. The Ready4Work program is a large scale systematic response across the country to help local communities address the needs of the reentry population.

From the Urban Institute, this report reviews historical and current funding trends of 100 federal programs, including TANF, Supplemental Security Income, Food Stamps, Section 8 Low-Income Housing Assistance and Low Income Home Energy Assistance, Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program. Through the data, authors offer insight into how children fare in the Federal Budget for 2007.

This bulletin addresses the specific challenges of permanency planning with older youth and highlights successful strategies and programs from across the country. From the Child Welfare Information Gateway, recommendations include making kinship care a priority to improve permanency among older youth.

The Institute for Research on Poverty authored this discussion paper on the impact of policies, such as child support orders, divorce policies, custody regulations, on the wellbeing of children and families. Authors use information on the marital status of parents to assess how children are affected by a change in status.

From the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, this is the annual homeless assessment report to Congress. In 2005, it was estimated that on any given day, 335,000 people were residing in shelters or transitional housing, and about 338,781 were unsheltered. Additionally, researchers found that in 2005, forty-seven percent of all sheltered homeless people were adult men.

This Fragile Families Brief, from the Center for Research on Child Wellbeing at Princeton University, focuses on how fathers’ risk factors are related to father involvement and relationship status among unmarried couples. Risk factors identified include physical abuse, substance abuse, and incarceration. Authors use qualitative and quantitative data on these risk factors to examine child involvement and the relationships among unmarried couples.

This report was completed by the Program Review and Investigations Committee on Connecticut’s Welfare Reform Initiative. Authors describe the Jobs First program in detail as well as provide caseload trends, recipient demographics, and funding trends. Connecticut has utilized the earned income tax credit as a anti-poverty strategy, and authors also provide recommendations for improving work participation among the caseload.

This research was completed at the Stanford Institute of Public Policy, and authors review the quality of teachers in high poverty schools in North Carolina as compared to teachers in schools with more advantaged students.

Reviewing data specific to the middle class, this Urban Institute brief provides trends on middle-income married parents' net worth as compared to unmarried parents. The net worth among middle-income unmarried parents was more unstable and 15 percent lower in 2004 than 1989. The wealth gap between unmarried and married parents continued to grow: middle-income married parents held 81 percent of the income and unmarried held the remaining 19 percent.