Capturing a clear picture of Americans’ financial lives involves looking at not only financial metrics but also the circumstances that shape people’s everyday lives, such as access to health care and affordable childcare. However, creating this holistic understanding can be difficult. Researchers and local officials must navigate a fragmented data landscape, which makes it challenging to understand people’s financial lives, much less develop solutions to improve them.

The Urban Institute’s Financial Well-Being Data Hub developed a tool to address the challenge by allowing users to browse financial well-being metrics across publicly available datasets. The tool’s more than 300 metrics include core measures of financial well-being, such as the value of household assets and debts, and contextual factors that shape people’s financial lives, such as disruptions due to climate-driven events. Users can filter metrics by data source, geography, and topic.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, workforce programs that provide employment and training services faced new challenges as they responded to public health restrictions and shifts in the needs of employers and job seekers. As part of the Building Evidence on Employment Strategies (BEES) project, researchers conducted virtual interviews from November 2021–April 2022 with staff members at 10 such programs to learn about how they used technology to adapt their services during the pandemic. Anticipating the end of restrictions on in-person service delivery as the pandemic slowed, many program staff members intended to maintain some of their newly developed virtual strategies, using a hybrid model that would blend in-person and virtual service delivery. This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation snapshot highlights three lessons that demonstrate how workforce programs leveraged a crisis to create important opportunities for streamlining and improving services.

As technology advances rapidly, the labor market exhibits a growing need for workers who receive ongoing skill development. Employers in many fields struggle to find adequately trained workers to meet their needs. Community college noncredit career and technical education (CTE) programs are an important contributor to skill and workforce development and help to close this skills gap. This MDRC brief summarizes early findings from a study of FastForward, which uses a pay-for-performance model to fund noncredit CTE programs at the 23 colleges in the Virginia Community College System. The brief also presents findings on the different approaches used by colleges and programs to deliver training, student and staff experiences in these CTE programs, and students’ academic and labor market outcomes.

In Monroe County, New York, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program and New York State’s Safety Net program work in tandem to provide temporary cash assistance to qualifying individuals who have low incomes. To maintain access to the assistance, those enrolled in these programs are required to attend a series of meetings and activities intended to assess program applicants’ needs and connect them to services the county believes help people move toward economic self-sufficiency.

The Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency-Next Generation (BIAS-NG) project aims to make human services programs work better for the people receiving services by reshaping program processes using lessons from behavioral science. The BIAS-NG team worked with Monroe County staff members to design and test two interventions that aimed to increase the attendance at required activities aforementioned. This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation report describes the experiences of participants before the interventions, the steps of developing interventions informed by behavioral science, and the implementation and evaluation of those interventions.

Nonprofit organizations that offer youth development and young adult talent development services have increasingly centered the voices of the young people who are participating in their programs. They have accomplished this by infusing youth-centered practices into their programming and, more formally, creating leadership opportunities such as youth councils and alumni associations. This Jobs for the Future brief draws from interviews with program leaders and the young people they have hired to highlight how and why organizations have brought young people into paid staff positions, what the experience has been like for them, and the meaning they are making of their experience. This brief highlights four organizations in the Learn and Earn to Achieve Potential (LEAP) initiative. LEAP is a national initiative of the Annie E. Casey Foundation that aims to help youth and young adults ages 14–25 who have been involved in the child welfare or juvenile justice systems, parenting youth or youth who have experienced homelessness succeed in school and at work by building and expanding education and employment pathways.

The Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act of 2014 (WIOA) improves services for people to find and keep jobs, and requires vocational rehabilitation (VR) agencies to use some of the money they receive from the federal government (about $1 of every $7) for pre-employment transition services (pre-ETS) for students with disabilities. Youth with disabilities, including those who receive Supplemental Security Income (SSI), might need support for finding and training for jobs beyond what school traditionally offers. Students with disabilities often do not have as many opportunities for career development and training, could have trouble finding work because of their disability, and might come from lower-income families.

This Mathematica brief summarizes findings from a study examining how transition-age youth with disabilities receiving SSI may have been affected by WIOA and their access to pre-ETS.

Many low-income working parents rely on subsidized childcare. The program supports qualifying families to work or attend school, many of whom may be unable to afford market-rate childcare. Examining parents’ income and employment patterns can guide policymakers to optimally structure subsidized childcare to support sustained employment and improve program engagement. This Chapin Hall brief series focuses on the work, school, and childcare engagement of Illinois families enrolled in the Child Care Assistance Program. This brief series includes:

1. Parental Need for Child Care Assistance;
2. Where Parents Work; and
3. Earnings & Child Care Assistance After One Year. 

This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation brief explores Addiction Recovery Care (ARC), a large-scale program in Kentucky combining residential clinical treatment for substance use disorders (SUDs) with employment services. ARC operates in several locations across the state, but is located primarily in rural, Appalachian areas hard-hit by the opioid crisis. This SUD residential treatment and recovery service is combined with employment services including job readiness training, internships, and online courses leading to a range of short-term occupational certifications. Employment services are provided in the later phases of the residential program when participants are relatively stabilized in terms of their SUD recovery. This brief offers recommendations for those implementing similar programs or that are interested in developing them.

Over the last three years, the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) has increased program investments in support of Public Law 102-477 (477) as part of their commitment to uplift indigenous communities, foster self-sufficiency, and honor tribal sovereignty. In fiscal year 2023, almost 300 Tribes within about 70 plans integrated 133 ACF grant awards totaling nearly 85% of the total funding integrated under 477 across the federal government. This includes Child Care and Development Fund, Community Services Block Grant, Tribal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and Native Employment Works programs. This ACF resource highlights examples of how tribes leverage the 477 Program based on the funding they get from ACF and their specific needs, including from Citizen Potawatomi Nation and from Shoshone-Bannock Tribes.