This issue brief from the Center for Law and Social Policy examines how young men of color have been disproportionately affected by the decline in employment over the past several years. It is often the case that this population has very few opportunities for exposure to career paths, obtaining work experience, and building employment history. This brief also provides recommendations for promising strategies to improve outcomes for young men of color.

This brief from the Education Commission of the States examines how to increase coordination between community colleges and local workforce boards under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA). It specifically discusses how states can utilize federal investments to improve these partnerships.

This website, created by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Trade Adjustment Assistance Community College and Career Training (TAACCCT) program, consists of open source educational resources to train adults for occupations in 16 high-demand fields such as manufacturing, energy, healthcare, and information technology.

This brief from MDRC examines whether quick employment or basic education and training better improves economic well-being of TANF participants. The authors present findings from three sites that took part in the National Evaluation of Welfare-to-Work Strategies study. Overall, the findings suggest that both types of welfare-to-work programs can increase earnings, compared with not offering such services.

This eight-minute video from MDRC highlights six New York participants of the Paycheck Plus demonstration, which is testing an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) for low-income single workers without children in New York City and Atlanta.

Although the labor market has been steadily recovering since the Great Recession, younger workers have not been benefiting at the same rate as the overall workforce. The unemployment rate among adults aged 20-24 is almost double the national average, and the jobless rate among people aged 16-19 is almost triple the national rate. This report from the National Skills Coalition and the National Youth Employment Coalition highlights how work-based learning can provide youth with job training, in addition to the essential income support for disconnected and at-youth individuals.

This report from the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation presents early findings from a random assignment evaluation of subsidized employment for TANF participants in Los Angeles County. The report analyzes the impact of two approaches to subsidized employment: paid work experience and on-the-job training.

This brief from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service provides states with information about 50 percent reimbursement funds. First, the brief details the staffing and infrastructure that may be necessary to implement an expanded Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Employment & Training (SNAP E&T) program. Additionally, it offers states recommendations for identifying and accessing important resources to support this added capacity.

The National League of Cities released this report that examines technological changes that are impacting the American workforce. The report outlines solutions to help cities plan for the future, while forecasting the viability of the retail and office administration sectors, in which 25 percent of Americans are presently employed.

This report presents interim impact and implementation findings of seven transitional jobs programs from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Enhanced Transitional Jobs Demonstration. Two of the sites in that study — in Atlanta and San Francisco — are also a part of ACF’s Subsidized and Transitional Employment Demonstration. The two studies closely coordinated beyond the shared sites, including shared reports, common data collection instruments, and other ongoing collaboration.

The report shares early results in the areas of implementation, employment outcomes, recidivism, and child support payment.

Early results include:

• The Enhanced Transitional Jobs Demonstration programs were relatively well implemented.
• All but one of the programs generated large increases in employment in the early months of follow-up; however, these increases were mostly or entirely the result of the transitional jobs and faded as participants left those jobs.
• Two of the three programs targeting people recently released from prison appear to have reduced recidivism.
• Most programs increased payment of child support. (Author abstract)