Family Pathfinders

The Region IV Administration for Children and Families, Office of Family Assistance (OFA); Region IV U.S. Department of Labor (DOL); and Region IV Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) convened a meeting entitled "Sustainable Employment Strategies: A TANF, Workforce, and Child Support Collaboration" in Atlanta, Georgia, from August 14-16, 2013. The meeting provided TANF, Workforce, and Child Support administrators and staff with an open forum for discussing critical issues impacting the collaboration of their respective entities towards sustainable employment strategies for their TANF and hard-to-serve population, and an opportunity to network both amongst themselves and with Region IV leadership. Region IV staff from each agency--ACF, DOL, and OCSE--shared lessons learned and gathered strategies that can improve their own programs' ability to identify and address multiple barriers, and develop pathways to create sustainable employment and career building opportunities for program participants. In addition, the meeting gave participants an opportunity to meet with their individual State teams to develop action plans that support interagency collaboration.

The Administration for Children and Families, Office of Family Assistance, Region VI hosted a hands-on and interactive training for TANF programs on September 11-13, 2012. The 2012 Fiscal and Data Management Workshop in Dallas, Texas covered topics from caseload reduction credits and maintenance of effort (MOE) to cost allocation, audits, and penalties and provided TANF program representatives with the most comprehensive and hands-on training on managing TANF programs available. The workshop brought together State TANF directors and fiscal staff to strategize on ways to manage TANF dollars, collect, analyze, and report TANF participant and program data. Attendees learned strategies for maximizing TANF dollars and local partnerships and worked with peers to understand promising strategies for improving program performance and participant outcomes.

This Urban Institute report details how state policy decisions affect TANF program administration in five states: California, Florida, Michigan, Texas, and Washington. The authors examined both cash assistance and other aspects of the block grant, plus how states responded to the Deficit Reduction Act and the recession.

This report summarizes the final impact results for the national Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) project. This project tested, using a random assignment design, the effectiveness of numerous programs intended to promote steady work and career advancement. All the programs targeted current and former welfare recipients and other low-wage workers, most of whom were single mothers. Given that earlier retention and advancement initiatives studied for these groups were largely not effective, ERA sought to examine a variety of programs that states and localities had developed for different populations, to determine whether effective strategies could be identified. In short, nine of the twelve programs examined in this report do not appear to be effective, but three programs increased employment levels, employment stability, and/or earnings, relative to control group levels, after three to four years of follow-up.

Key Findings:

 - Out of the twelve programs included in the report, three ERA programs produced positive economic impacts; nine did not. All three programs increased employment retention and advancement. Increases in employment retention and earnings were largest and most consistent over time in the Texas ERA program in Corpus Christi (one of three sites that operated this program); the Chicago ERA program; and the Riverside County, California, Post-Assistance Self-Sufficiency (PASS) ERA program. These programs increased annual earnings by between 7 percent and 15 percent relative to control group levels. Each of them served a different target group, which suggests that employment retention and advancement programs can work for a range of populations. However, three-fourths of the ERA programs included in this report did not produce gains in targeted outcomes beyond what control group members were able to attain on their own with the existing services and supports available in the ERA sites.

 - Increases in participation beyond control group levels were not consistent or large, which may have made it difficult for the programs to achieve impacts on employment retention and advancement. Engaging individuals in employment and retention services at levels above what they would have done in the absence of the programs was a consistent challenge. In addition, staff had to spend a lot of time and resources on placing unemployed individuals back into jobs, which made it difficult for them to focus on helping those who were already working to keep their jobs or move up.

Before the ERA project began, there was not much evidence about the types of programs that could improve employment retention and advancement outcomes for current or former welfare recipients. The ERA evaluation provides valuable insights about the nature of retention and advancement problems and it underscores a number of key implementation challenges that a program would have to address. In addition, it reveals shortcomings in a range of common approaches now in use, while identifying three distinct approaches that seem promising and worthy of further exploration. (author abstract)