Every year, over 600,000 individuals are released from our nation's prisons. Individuals who have limited job opportunities are more likely to be rearrested. The U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration will host a webinar on June 13, 2023 from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. ET which will discuss innovative strategies on ways to engage and support returning citizens to return to the workforce. The webinar will highlight programs which assist with the challenges they experience and offer the support required for success. Presenters will speak about re-entry and present state and local programs that help prepare the population pre-release. Outreach strategies will also be covered that engage returning citizens post-release to ensure quality jobs are obtained, in turn, reducing recidivism.

The Center for Law and Social Policy’s (CLASP) mental health work has consistently shown that young people strongly prefer to receive support from peers and to receive support in trusted community-based settings, including youth workforce development programs. This blogpost from CLASP highlights a promising program aimed at young adults in Los Angeles (LA) County that will launch in the summer of 2023. It will bring together two sectors that are often siloed: workforce development and mental health services. LA County has 14 Youth CareerSource Centers that serve as hubs for youth workforce development programs. As part of this new program to support mental health, each center will recruit 3 to 5 young people ages 18-24 to participate in a peer youth support certification program. The partnership between the youth workforce system and the county-level mental health system in LA County demonstrates an expansion of mental health care for opportunity youth enrolled in workforce development programs, while also building career opportunities for young people who want to provide much-needed support to their peers.

The Austin Guaranteed Income Pilot is testing how direct cash might help individuals and families with low incomes weather their unstable housing circumstances in some of the highest-poverty and most rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods in Austin, Texas. In September 2022, UpTogether and 10 community-based partners enrolled 135 households to receive $1,000 per month for one year. This fact sheet draws from survey data at baseline and six months into the program, as well as participant interviews, to present a snapshot of preliminary outcomes.

Parents, extended family, and communities are all responsible for promoting children’s well-being and protecting them from trauma. When children cannot remain safely with their parents, child welfare experts view kinship foster care as a best practice and seek opportunities to promote a “kin first” approach. This Chapin Hall policy brief identifies how kinship families form, details evidence of how kinship diversion programs operate, and offers policy and practice recommendations on how to explore, make meaning of, and implement changes to child welfare agencies’ kinship diversion practices.

Working with previously untapped community partners helps kinship-serving agencies to better empower and sustain kinship families. The Grandfamilies & Kinship Support Network will host a webinar on June 13, 2023 from 2:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. ET featuring a panel representing national organizations, including Family Resource Centers, that have local programming in communities across the country. Speakers will share how and why they began supporting kinship families and provide strategies for approaching untapped collaborators and working with them to serve local communities.

Labor force participation (the percentage of people working or looking for work) plummeted by more than 3 percentage points during the first two months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, representing a decline of more than 8.2 million people. While about half of the drop was quickly regained, participation has stagnated at about 1 percentage point below its pre-pandemic level. This Brookings Podcast on Economic Activity highlights a paper entitled “Where are the Missing Workers?”. During the podcast, researchers discuss several possible explanations, including fear of COVID-19 and shifting work-life balance preferences.

Child poverty is associated with both short- and long-term health and well-being. Poverty affects child health directly through the experience of deprivation, such as through food insufficiency or lack of housing, but also indirectly through the availability of parental or community resources. Economic resources also shape children's access to health-promoting policies, like education, child care, parental leave, and health care, which affect both current and later-life health and mortality. Many income support policies also reduce poverty and improve economic well-being, which in turn improves child health. This free open access article reviews the evidence on income support policies in the United States and their effects on child health. This paper is not an exhaustive literature review but paints a broad picture of findings related to income support and child health. It also outlines policy considerations and areas where additional research is needed to understand how income support and poverty reduction might best support child health.

Research has suggested that people living in higher poverty areas experience more acute systemic problems than people in lower poverty areas (e.g., limited access to medical services, healthy and affordable food, quality education, and civic engagement opportunities). Government agencies and researchers have previously identified counties with high rates of poverty over an extended period as targets for increased level of support. While definitions vary, counties are typically considered to be in persistent poverty if they maintained poverty rates of 20 percent or more for the past 30 years. This Census Bureau report expands upon the persistent poverty literature by examining subcounty geographies (specifically, census tracts) and comparing those results to county results. By using this smaller geography, additional populations that may benefit from targeted intervention are identifiable.

Youth Thrive, a research-informed framework on youth well-being and an action-oriented initiative of the Center for the Study of Social Policy (CSSP), is designed to better support healthy development and promote well-being for youth with partners across the country. For the past eight years, Youth Thrive has focused on strategies to improve systems that serve youth who are most marginalized in society, specifically focusing on child welfare and juvenile justice systems and the service system that supports youth who are at-risk of homelessness. CSSP will host a webinar on June 8, 2023 from 3:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. ET to discuss new resources from Youth Thrive which organizations can use to help young people build their protective and promotive factors. Participants will learn about resources such as new graphics and animated videos, a practice blueprint with many tools and guides, an interactive professional development workshop for staff on social connections, and an instructional video on the Youth Thrive Self-Assessment Survey.