The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act passed in 1996 replaced the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. TANF imposed work requirements on participants who received benefits for a certain period of time and time limits on benefits that were paid with federal funds. Some evaluations conducted at that time, including the National Evaluation of Welfare-to-Work Strategies (NEWWS), found these new approaches led to some positive short-term effects for participants. This report is part of the From Theory to Practice project and presents findings from an analysis of 20-year outcomes and impacts of an employment-focused program offered to welfare recipients in Portland, Oregon in the 1990s as part of NEWWS. The findings described in the report represent some of the first available evidence on how individuals who previously received welfare fared in the labor market over the long term and on how sequence and cluster analyses can provide a richer picture of their trajectories and program impacts.

In recent years, many healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) programs serving couples with low incomes have offered participants economic stability services in addition to traditional HMRE programming focused on relationship skills. The Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services (STREAMS) evaluation included an impact study of Empowering Families, an HMRE program with integrated economic stability services for couples with low incomes raising children together. The program was implemented by The Parenting Center, a community-based social services provider in Fort Worth, Texas. Empowering Families’ core service was an eight-session workshop that taught relationship skills integrated with content on employment and financial literacy. The program supplemented this workshop with one-on-one employment counseling and financial coaching services.

January is National Mentoring Month—an opportunity to recognize the dedicated mentors whose wisdom, guidance, and positive examples set new workers on a path to success, and to affirm the value of mentorship in the career trajectory of jobs-seekers and workers in our communities. This set of resources provides background information where one can learn more about mentoring and mentoring opportunities.

The Health Profession Opportunity Grants (HPOG) program offers education, training, support services, and employment assistance to prepare Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) recipients and other adults with low incomes for occupations in the healthcare field that pay well and are expected to either experience labor shortages or be in high demand. This HPOG 2.0 National Evaluation Implementation Study Report documents how 27 non-tribal HPOG 2.0 grantees designed and implemented their programs, including program contexts, administration, grant expenditures, training and support services, and employment assistance services. It also documents participant characteristics and their engagement in program services and training activities.

Keeping track of key career and job information is an important activity for workforce system customers. CareerOneStop now offers user accounts to save career and job searches and share information with others. The U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration will host a webinar on January 25, 2023 from 1:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. ET which will go in-depth on the new user account functionality and demonstrate new How-to Guides that help customers find and use the best resources to reach their career and job goals.

Millions of Americans have had their driver’s licenses suspended at some point because they have not paid legal fines and fees. Having one’s license suspended can make it harder to find and keep a job, can increase one’s exposure to the criminal legal system, and can generally place great strain on one’s life and the life of one’s family. This issue brief examines the causes, consequences, and scope of the practice of suspending driver’s licenses due to unpaid fines or fees. It focuses on the impact of license suspension on employment, while also examining the larger structural factors that facilitate the widespread use of legal fines and fees to generate revenue for municipalities. The brief also highlights He Got Up!, a program based in Florida that works to address the challenges of people affected by this practice.

The Agricultural Act of 2014 authorized $200 million for the development, implementation, and evaluation of pilot projects to test innovative strategies to reduce dependency on and increase employment among Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participants. California, Delaware, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Illinois, Mississippi, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington received grants in March 2015 and began implementing their pilots between January and April 2016. Resource materials in this post include a summary of findings from these 10 pilots and a set of four issue briefs. These issue briefs present cross-pilot findings that cover participation patterns in selected Employment and Training (E&T) activities, effectiveness of work-based learning, employment patterns after occupational skills training, and how sanctions affect participants in mandatory SNAP E&T programs.

This report summarizes the design and implementation of MyGoals for Employment Success (MyGoals), an experimental employment coaching demonstration program, launched in early 2017. The program aims to help recipients of housing assistance in Baltimore and Houston who are unemployed or working less than 20 hours a month set and achieve employment and related goals. Coaches follow a systematic process that focuses explicitly on self-regulation skills—the skills needed to finish tasks, stay organized, and control emotions. Financial incentives are offered for attending coaching sessions and achieving employment outcomes. MyGoals is one of four coaching interventions included in the Evaluation of Employment Coaching for TANF and Related Populations project.

The U.S. Department of Labor has issued the YouthBuild Funding Opportunity Announcement, which will award grants on a competitive basis to organizations providing pre-apprenticeship services that support education, occupational skills training, and employment services to opportunity youth, ages 16 to 24. YouthBuild supports youth who left high school prior to graduation that also have other risk factors, including being an adjudicated youth, youth aging out of foster care, youth with disabilities, migrant farmworker youth, youth experiencing housing instability, and other disadvantaged youth populations. The YouthBuild program model prepares participants for quality jobs in a variety of careers, including infrastructure, and contains wraparound services such as mentoring, trauma-informed care, personal counseling, and employment – all key strategies for addressing community violence.

Applications are due by February 7, 2023, no later than 11:59 p.m. ET.

The Works Wonders^® curriculum aims to connect young people in foster care with careers that interest them. Under the Works Wonders model, staff members customize learning plans and recruit local companies to employ older youth with foster care experience. Typical programming includes coursework, mentoring, job shadowing, paid internships, and career guidance. This blogpost examines the adaptation and expansion of the Work Wonders model at Monroe Harding (a Nashville-based nonprofit) in Tennessee and Foster Success (a start­up business training program) in Indiana to better serve their local youth.