American Job Centers in Southern and Northern Nevada are integrating TANF and WIOA services to connect more work-eligible participants to education, training, and employment opportunities. To streamline and expand service delivery, the American Job Centers have implemented a common referral process and co-located TANF and WIOA staff. Nevada is also designing an integrated data system to improve cross-program tracking and service coordination.

Sections of the brief focus on joint service delivery, resource sharing, and shared learning. 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.

TANF and WIOA programs in Tulare County, California are working together to coordinate employment services for CalWORKs (TANF) and work-eligible clients. Strategies include co-enrollment in programs—including WIOA career services, TANF supportive services, and a subsidized employment program—as well as shared spaces, cross-program workgroups, and a common database to exchange performance outcomes. This site also has a special focus on serving migrants and seasonal workers in rural areas.

Sections of the brief discuss 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 case statement highlights the collaboration between American Job Centers (called WorkSource) and TANF agencies in Spokane, Washington. WorkSource and partners have restructured staffing, resource allocation, and approaches to workforce development services with a customer-centered design. Leaders are also investing in organizational change through staff training, cross-program communication, and building support among staff at all levels.

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. Sections of the brief describe joint service delivery, resource sharing, shared learning, and the management of collaborative activities. Readers, especially TANF programs looking to scale or replicate the practices, may also access links to the state TANF plan and funding information for more context and resources.

On February 7, 2019 from 2:00 p.m. to 3:15 p.m. ET, the National Association of Counties will host the third of a three-part webinar series on evidence-based policymaking. The previous two webinars, Identifying Effective Programs and Using Evidence in Budgeting & Contracting, can be found on their website. This session will focus on practical tips that practitioners can use to monitor and assist service providers using data information. Also, county officials currently using evidence-based policymaking will be present to discuss their own experiences and answer participant questions.

In this February 6, 2019 webinar from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. ET, the WIOA performance accountability team from the U.S. Departments of Labor and Education will discuss recent federal guidance on data validation for state reporting. The webinar will not only answer questions on developing data validation systems that comply with new reliability metrics for data reporting, but will also facilitate interagency and interstate communication on challenges, solutions, and best practices for data validation.

Using data to inform, create, and administer service provision is the best way to ensure effective programmatic change. On January 31, 2019 at 1:00 p.m. ET, Mathematica will host a webinar for practitioners to explore using administrative data in pre-employment transitional programs. Presenters will showcase new ways to use tools like Microsoft Excel to analyze demographic, geographic, and training characteristics and how to analyze these data to improve vocational rehabilitation services.

This blog post from Child Trends presents findings from a recent Early Childhood Data Collaborative survey, which noted that 22 states have created data sharing systems to measure the utilization and outcomes of early childhood services. However, this study also suggested that most states have not yet included home visiting data in their integrated systems due to challenges in linking data across a range of home visiting programs with varying data collection requirements and data storage capacity.

The new Community Needs Assessment (CNA) online data tool can now be found within the CARES engagement network and features structural improvements to increase user experience. It still allows for mapping and reporting data, but has updated environments and easier data downloading features. They will be hosting a webinar on August 14, 2018 to give an online tour of the improved tool.

Studying large public social programs can be a challenge for social scientists. Recent technological developments have allowed researchers to use big data — data sets that combine survey and administrative data — to examine how social programs work and how they affect their participants. One method by which researchers accomplish this is “text mining,” a process of finding patterns from large amounts of unstructured text data. In this report from Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, researchers explore how text mining contributed to a better understanding of the behavior of families in the foster care system and the role of the courts on reunification.