This report highlights the MyGoals for Employment Success demonstration, an employment coaching program where participants are empowered to set and achieve goals by focusing on executive skills, which are the mental skills used to conduct tasks. These skills include stress tolerance, emotional control, time management, organization, perseverance, and mental flexibility. The use of executive skills affects how participants can navigate the labor market, acquire credentials, and work performance. The report presents findings on how the MyGoals model was operationalized and implemented among participants living in public housing in Baltimore, Maryland and Houston, Texas.

This research-to-practice brief identifies programmatic solutions to support reentry for young adults who have been involved in the juvenile justice or criminal justice system as they navigate employment and education pathways. The brief summarizes best practices from nine communities under the three-year U.S. Department of Labor-funded Compass Rose Collaborative (CRC). CRC communities are: Southeast Arkansas; Los Angeles, California; Denver, Colorado; Hartford, Connecticut; Louisville, Kentucky; Baltimore, Maryland; Boston, Massachusetts; St. Louis, Missouri; and Albany, New York.

This Office of Family Assistance-sponsored case study shares the experiences of the Department of Social Services of Anne Arundel County, Maryland in its use of OFA’s Online Work Readiness Assessment (OWRA) to improve the outcomes of its TANF participants. Maryland has been involved with OWRA since it was a pilot site in 2009. For this case study, county representatives recount the most useful parts of the tool in working with their participants towards self-sufficiency as well as potential places of improvement. They also detail the state’s data systems as well as the partnerships already established with two research institutions to explore avenues for determining OWRA’s impact.

Maryland’s Lower Eastern Shore job center and its partners have streamlined TANF and WIOA assessment and referral processes, as well as sharing staff, spaces, and resources across programs, to improve service delivery to TANF customers. Job center partners aim to match job seekers with employers through opportunities such as a “reverse job fair,” a job search database, and a regional job developer to specifically work with customers. Maryland also focuses on serving rural populations, with transportation subsidies and a mobile job center that delivers select WIOA services to TANF clients in rural areas.

This brief is organized into sections on joint service delivery, resource sharing, shared learning, and managing collaborative activities. Readers may also access links to the state TANF plan and funding information for more context and resources. This brief is part of the TANF Works! TANF/WIOA Collaboration Series, through which the Office of Family Assistance’s Integrating Innovative Employment and Economic Stability Strategies (IIEESS) initiative seeks to highlight innovative coordination strategies of TANF and WIOA programs to serve low-income or vulnerable populations.

This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation report reviews the effectiveness of using coaches to help low-income individuals move toward self-sufficiency. The evaluation profiles four coaching models: Iowa’s Family Development and Self-Sufficiency (FaDSS); coaching at home visits implemented in Jefferson County, Colorado; LIFT, a national nonprofit organization that delivers career and financial coaching in Washington (D.C.), New York (New York), Chicago (Illinois), and Los Angeles (California); and MyGoals for Employment Success, a model designed by MDRC and piloted in Baltimore (Maryland) and Houston (Texas).

This Annie E. Casey Foundation blogpost features lessons from Maryland MENTOR to illustrate how to improve the quality and quantity of mentoring programs. Also mentioned are projects that Maryland MENTOR has initiated to increase the number of mentors, including convening town halls, building professional development skills for mentors, and creating a database to connect volunteers with young people looking for mentors. While this organization’s scope is limited to Maryland, some findings noted in the blogpost can be used to help grow and support mentoring programs nationally.