This video by the U.S. Department of Education’s Rehabilitation Services Administration (RSA) offers a historical perspective of RSA’s Vocational Rehabilitation program, which provides services and support to persons with disabilities to maximize their employment. The video is part of the program’s 100th year celebration.

This Annie E. Casey Foundation blogpost discusses a new Foundation report entitled The Center for Working Families (CWF) Framework. This CWF framework or approach strives to assist low-income families in achieving greater financial security by integrating workforce development and employment services, income, work supports, financial literacy education, and coaching. The report highlights CWF in various programmatic and institutional settings across the U.S., as well as how the Foundation has helped develop the framework and how organizations have applied this integrated service delivery approach.

This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation-funded report evaluates the effectiveness of the Cognitive Behavioral Intervention for Justice Involved Individuals Seeking Employment (CBI-Emp) curriculum to address economic stability under the Building Bridges and Bonds (B3) study. Economic stability is one of the three approaches within the Responsible Fatherhood (RF) grant program. A process study assessed how three RF program grantees implemented CBI-Emp, which assists individuals with recent justice involvement in identifying and changing thinking patterns and actions that prevent positive outcomes. Under the study, participating fathers were randomly selected and offered either their respective organization’s services or CBI-Emp with the range of services offered by their organization; these interventions’ costs and impacts were evaluated.

This video covers highlights from the “Thriving Communities for a Better Southern Nevada” meeting that was held in Las Vegas, Nevada on January 10, 2020. This event, hosted by the Office of Family Assistance (OFA) and Las Vegas-Clark County, Nevada, brought together a local planning team, community leaders, and practitioners who discussed constructive measures to help individuals overcome barriers to employment and improve their families’ economic well-being and mobility.

This Urban Institute blogpost profiles Kentucky’s Justice to Journeyman program, a prison apprenticeship program. The blogpost notes a key feature of the model: starting classroom occupational instruction (for jobs not available at correctional facilities) at the beginning of the apprenticeship and on-the-job training (OJT) upon the apprentice’s release. This classroom instruction and OJT leads to placement for jobs as welders, electricians, and telecommunications workers. Research cited in the blogpost notes that conventional prison-based apprenticeship programs offer occupational training in jobs typically found in correctional facilities, such as groundskeeping, cleaning, and cooking, which effectively limits economic prospects for returning citizens.

This report highlights how public sector human services decision-makers identify and use needed evidence. Recommendations are made on how these leaders can contribute to a broader use of various types of evidence. The report concludes with a literature review of 27 sources related to policymakers’ evidence needs and delves into the types of information policymakers want and need to make decisions on social policy pertaining to areas such as child welfare and youth employment.

This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation report examines San Francisco’s STEP Forward program, which targeted diverse low-income job seekers including CalWORKs (California’s Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program) or CalFresh (California’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) recipients, or individuals who have exhausted unemployment insurance benefits. This paper describes a random assignment evaluation of 837 adults – those with access to STEP Forward services and a control group without access to STEP Forward services but to other services. First-year costs of the program for job readiness services and subsidies were evaluated.