This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation brief is an overview of how HPOG 2.0 programs adapted during the COVID-19 pandemic and continued to provide services to participants. It examines changes programs adopted during the first 10 months of the COVID-19 pandemic (approximately March—December 2020). Local HPOG 2.0 staff described strategies that helped them continue operations despite unanticipated implementation hurdles. The brief also highlights promising practices that may be of interest to healthcare training providers and policymakers.

This is the first brief in the Health Profession Opportunity Grants (HPOG) 2.0 Participant Perspectives series. HPOG 2.0 funded local career pathways programs to prepare participants for occupations in the healthcare field that paid well and were expected to either experience labor shortages or be in high demand. This brief presents insights from in-depth, in-person interviews with participants in career pathways programs funded under HPOG 2.0. It describes participant experiences navigating career pathways and suggests implications for career pathways program practice and for evaluations of career pathways programs.

This report includes a review of effective employment and training (E&T) program components and practices published between 2016 and 2020 to provide information that can be used to align SNAP E&T policy and programs to achieve the best training, employment, and wage gains for SNAP participants and integrate the E&T program within the broader public workforce system. The report also provides specific recommendations for building effective SNAP E&T programs, including recommendations related to developing successful workforce system partnerships and identifying the right mix of services to meet participants’ needs.

The U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration has announced a funding opportunity under the Workforce Pathways for Youth demonstration grant program. Workforce Pathways for Youth demonstration grants support national out-of-school time (OST) organizations that serve historically underserved and marginalized youth ages 14 to 21. Funding will also support partnerships between workforce development boards and youth-serving organizations. Applications are due by April 25, 2022.

This playbook, developed in collaboration between the National Community Action Partnership and the American Public Human Services Association, explores how Community Action and human services agencies partnered together in response to the COVID-19 public health and economic crisis. It presents opportunities for alignment in providing whole family supports, making career pathways possible for SNAP recipients, and tackling structural inequities in accessing services. Examples of these alignments include western Maryland and Virginia (whole family supports), Minnesota and Oregon (SNAP Employment & Training), and rural Ohio and Montgomery County, Maryland (dismantling structural inequities).

What can we learn from decades of research on interventions designed to boost employment and earnings for people with low incomes? The Pathways to Work Evidence Clearinghouse conducted a meta-analysis to synthesize findings from more than 220 interventions and 300 studies to gain new insights into evidence on what works. The Clearinghouse will host a webinar on March 9, 2022 from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. ET to discuss these findings and address three primary questions:

• What interventions work to improve the employment and earnings of people with low incomes?
• Do the interventions work best for particular groups of people? If so, which groups?
• In what contexts do interventions appear to be most successful?

Panelists will also describe how practitioners and policymakers can use the findings to best meet the needs of populations seeking gainful employment.

The Pathways Clearinghouse Guide is for researchers conducting rigorous evaluations of interventions that aim to improve employment outcomes, reduce employment challenges, and support self-sufficiency for people with low incomes. It introduces the Pathways Clearinghouse, which identifies interventions that aim to directly or indirectly improve employment outcomes and systematically evaluates and summarizes the evidence of interventions’ effectiveness. Researchers and research funders can use this high-level overview to better understand the Pathways Clearinghouse and its processes for selecting studies for review, assigning study quality ratings, and assessing the evidence of effectiveness for an intervention.

This toolkit is designed to help states create career pathways systems that integrate and expand partnerships between state human service agencies and community and technical college systems and institutions so that more people have the opportunity to train for a quality career. The toolkit includes recommendations for how SNAP E&T and TANF can support high-quality career pathways system development and partnerships with community colleges. It also illustrates model career pathways frameworks from Arkansas and Oregon.

This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation research-to-practice brief highlights key findings from the final report of the five-year evaluation of the Tribal HPOG 2.0 Program. The brief describes how the Tribal HPOG 2.0 grantees implemented the career pathways framework for their HPOG programs. It also presents program and participant outcomes from the five-year evaluation.

This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation brief is a literature review and meta-analysis of data from the Pathways Clearinghouse. The analysis sought to understand the interventions and types of services with the strongest evidence of success in improving employment, earnings, and related outcomes for people with low incomes during recessions and recoveries.