This Jobs for the Future resource highlights Unlocked Labs, which is a program that offers technological education in corrections facilities and creates pathways to quality jobs for people who are incarcerated. To highlight the beneficial impacts these programs can have, three members of the Unlocked Labs team share their stories of how training and employment experience catalyzed their professional journeys from incarceration to well-paid quality jobs.

In this Defending Ideas podcast episode, the Alliance for Opportunity talks with Sutherland Institute to give an overview of some of the proposals currently in Congress through the lens of potential reforms to federal welfare programs. They discuss whether it is possible to save taxpayer dollars while improving outcomes for families who truly need help getting back on their feet.

There are impoverished families who are discouraged from pursuing upward mobility through work, reacting to what they perceive as perverse incentives woven into the government safety net – or “benefit cliffs.” This Sutherland Institute report evaluates the economic decision-making of safety net participants based on their understanding of the programs they use. The report answers these questions: 

1. Are Utahns who participate in government assistance programs changing their economic behavior in response to benefits cliffs, and if so, what actions are they taking regarding work/earned income?
2. Which government assistance programs are these Utahns most concerned with losing? In other words, which benefits are they trying to preserve?
3. What is the level of awareness of alternatives to government assistance programs in the event of a program participant losing a given benefit?

The American Enterprise Institute hosted a discussion on child welfare priorities, where experts examined how to reform a system facing a decline in foster homes and competing priorities between family reunification and child protection. This webinar recording highlights the panelists’ conversation on the importance of distinguishing between “complex poverty”—which involves substance abuse and mental illness—and material poverty.

Over the past ten years, only a few states have invested TANF and TANF-related funds on healthy marriage and relationship-related services. This National Healthy Marriage Resource Center fact sheet outlines how TANF funds can be used to fund programs that develop and maintain healthy marriages/families. The fact sheet highlights economic and physical data that supports this public policy initiative and justifies the investment of public funds in healthy marriage activities.

Research shows that parents and children tend to fare better on a range of outcomes when they live in low-conflict, two-parent families. Recognizing the potential benefits of healthy relationships for low-income families, Congress has funded several rounds of grants for Healthy Marriage (HM) programs since 2006. These grants aim to promote the well-being and long-term success of children and families by fostering parents’ relationship stability and economic well-being. This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation brief presents the impacts of HM programs about one year after study enrollment on: 

• the status and quality of the couples’ relationships;
• the co-parenting relationships; and
• job and career advancement.

The Empowering Families program, as a part of the Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services (STREAMS) evaluation, a large multisite evaluation conducted from 2015 to 2022 to identify strategies for improving the delivery and effectiveness of healthy marriage and relationship education program, included an eight-session workshop that integrated Healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) content with information on financial literacy and job and career advancement. The HMRE content came from Family Wellness, a relationship skills and parenting curriculum designed to promote healthy family interactions. The program supplemented workshops with one-on-one services, including case management, financial coaching, and employment counseling. This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation report describes the impact of the Empowering Families program after one year. The report also provides information on program implementation and costs.

Healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) programs aim to support the well-being of families. For such programs to be effective, it is critical that clients attend regularly, yet studies have found that HMRE program providers sometimes struggle to maintain high rates of participation. Identifying and exploring typical participation patterns in HMRE programming can increase understanding of this challenge and point to ways in which programs can promote and support regular participation. This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation brief describes typical patterns of participation in three programs that were part of the Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services (STREAMS) evaluation, a large multisite evaluation conducted from 2015 to 2022 to identify strategies for improving the delivery and effectiveness of healthy marriage and relationship education programs. The brief identifies distinct patterns of participation in each of these programs and provides profiles of the clients who participate in these distinct ways.

This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation digital report shares highlights from the Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services (STREAMS) evaluation, a large multisite evaluation conducted from 2015 to 2022 to identify strategies for improving the delivery and effectiveness of healthy marriage and relationship education programs. This report describes the five grantees —in Georgia, Florida, Denver, Missouri, and Texas— and the services they provided. To capture the perspectives and experiences of the people most directly affected by the programs, this report also tells the personal stories of some of the program staff and participants who contributed to STREAMS.

The findings from the Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services (STREAMS) impact studies, a large multisite evaluation conducted from 2015 to 2022 to identify strategies for improving the delivery and effectiveness of healthy marriage and relationship education programs, are summarized in this Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation webpage. The webpage offers a series of site-specific impact reports which present findings from additional exploratory analyses and discuss the implications of the impact findings for healthy marriage and relationship education programming and research.