This Upjohn Institute policy brief analyzes the long-run outcomes of Earned Income Tax Credit and welfare time limits to increase employment and reduce public assistance; the brief also reviews the impact of anti-poverty programs on geographical locations where participants live. The research and analysis examine these anti-poverty programs and whether they have made a difference not only for individual households and participants, but also for disadvantaged neighborhoods.

The Office of Family Assistance hosted a webinar on Wednesday, July 31, 2019 showcasing several Social Enterprise Organizations (SEOs) and their unique strengths, challenges, and contexts. SEOs are hybrid organizations that aim to balance business and social missions. They use a profit-maximizing approach to solve society’s challenges and help improve individual and community well-being. SEOs target hard-to-serve populations to help remove barriers to self-sufficiency by offering opportunities such as employment, housing, or mental and physical health services. Various strategies, such as workforce training, job placement, microfinancing, literacy resources, and offering affordable health services, are just some of the approaches used by social enterprises in pursuing their missions. SEOs are unique because they use capital investment to create a social benefit and revenue, which allows the organizations to be self-sufficient. Social enterprises are a promising solution to helping resolve social problems in the future.

The Urban Institute will host a webinar on July 25, 2019 from 3:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. ET to discuss Benefit Chicago and the Western New York Impact Investment Fund, which are models of place-based impact investing. Drawing from recently released practitioner briefs, the webinar will also cover participants’ experiences with building the collaboration among partners and their deployment of impact capital in the field.

This Prosperity Now report is the culmination of an 18-month partnership with the Citi Foundation to design and implement the Youth Financial Capability Fund, which integrated workforce development with financial capability services and supported five youth workforce development organizations: Genesys Works, Juma Ventures, NPower, STRIVE International, and the Urban Alliance. The report identifies 11 key findings in the following five categories that agencies can use when designing financial capability programs to meet young people’s needs: preparing for organizational change, putting youth at the center, exploring partnerships’ role, measuring progress, and managing organizational change and sustaining financial capability work. Also highlighted are recommendations on how to partner with employers, offer multi-generational financial capability services to support household financial empowerment, and collaborate across sectors to address barriers that disconnected youth face when considering their financial well-being.

This comprehensive dataset from the University of Kentucky’s Center for Poverty Research profiles state-level data on every state, reflecting numbers, rates, amounts, and/or percentages of population; employed and unemployed individuals; three food insecurity levels; personal income; low-income uninsured children; and recipients receiving workers’ compensation, AFDC/TANF, SNAP, SSI, Medicaid, and EITC credits from 1980 to 2017. This dataset was updated in May 2019 to reflect 2017 in this longitudinal data collection that assembles information from multiple sources into one place.

This policy brief from the University of California at Davis, Center for Poverty Research examines the long-term persistence of “deep” poverty, or living on an income less than half of the official poverty line. Research indicates that two-thirds of persons who fall into deep poverty exit that status in two years or less, though recurrence is fairly common as re-entry lasts between 2.2 years and 4.7 years. The findings of the brief note that in-kind and tax benefits can reduce the recurrence of deep poverty to 1.7 years to 3.5 years.

The Urban Institute will host a webinar on June 27, 2019 from 3:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. ET to present the latest trends on place-based impact investing collaborations between foundations and community organizations. Presentations on practitioner briefs will focus on these elements of collaborative place-based impact investing: creating solid ecosystems, mapping capacities, and deploying capital. Speakers include representatives from the Urban Institute, Mission Investors Exchange, and the MacArthur Foundation.

This Urban Institute research report analyzes the potential of a universal Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). The review looks at the proposal for a wage tax credit of 100 percent of annual earnings up to a maximum credit of $10,000 and analyzes the economic effects of a universal EITC to address poverty for families headed by a full-time worker. This assessment is compared to the effects of the current EITC law.

This report from the Center for Policy Research at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School reviews the implications of childhood exposure to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) on marriage and childbearing. In particular, the researchers examine whether EITC has intergenerational benefits by affecting the family formation decisions of men and women exposed to EITC in childhood. The research suggests that EITC investment in youth delays for women the timing of first births.