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 Urban Institute report is an evaluation of the Family-Centered Community Change (FCCC) approach, launched by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, at three pilot sites: Buffalo, New York; Columbus, Ohio; and San Antonio, Texas. The three FCCC sites adopted two-generation approaches in the areas of early childhood education and child care, partnerships with local elementary schools, after-school care, job-training opportunities for adults, financial education and literacy, and coaching to assist parents with goal setting. This five-year evaluation began in 2013 and concluded in 2018.

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 National Skills Coalition research-to-practice brief identifies ways that adult education, vocational rehabilitation, and workforce development partners can collaborate and strengthen each respective system to create and enhance educational and economic opportunities for adults with physical or mental disabilities. The brief also describes an example of how this alignment and collaboration has been implemented in the Rural Capital area near Austin, Texas.

This National Skills Coalition issue brief outlines effective industry partnerships for work-based learning that are designed to meet both business and worker needs. Four case studies are presented in addition to lessons about work-based learning and the need for partnership with employers to align workforce, education, and human service systems; these case studies cover models in Georgia (health care apprenticeships), Oregon (work-based learning), Texas (women in construction trades), and Indiana (advanced manufacturing).

Texas’s Summer Earn and Learn (SEAL) program and the Promoting Readiness of Minors in Supplemental Security Income (PROMISE) programs in Arkansas are identified as successful examples of collaboration between vocational rehabilitation agencies and workforce boards. This Mathematica report also identifies key features of the programs so that policymakers can choose, develop, and adapt similar partnerships within their own context.