Positive Youth Development (PYD) is a capacity-building approach to program interventions that aims to promote soft skills, positive relationships, community involvement, family-school-work linkages, and academic engagement among youth to create a fully supportive and safe environment. The PILOT tool, developed by Child Trends, works on implementing those strategies concretely in the workforce for youth in primarily middle skill jobs. After working with five organizations to integrate the PILOT tool into their workplaces, Child Trends found that it not only improves the work outcomes of vulnerable youth populations and generates internal and external conversations about PYD, but that many places that practice these initiatives do so without formal recognition or prompting and thus go unfunded. Child Trends expects to further help program stakeholders, leaders, and funders in the next phase of their program when they look into how to systematize PYD policies.

This paper tests the relationship between maternal depression, parental quality, and child outcomes. It finds that experiencing adversity as a child is a factor in current maternal depression, which in turn affects parental engagement and sensitivity to children’s distress, but not non-distress. Thus, different interventions should be used for mothers who have experienced trauma depending on whether the goal is identifying and responding to distress signals or increasing parental sensitivity to their children overall.

As youth transition into adulthood, financial literacy is crucial for self-sufficiency. To help young adults understand and manage their finances, the Federal Trade Commission and Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention will sponsor a webinar on September 20 on topics such as generating good credit, avoiding debt burden on student loans, buying cars, and avoiding identity theft, among other important topics.

This report from Brandeis University’s Institute on Assets and Social Policy uses data on Secure Jobs participants who entered skills training to explain how Secure Jobs sites use short-term skills training programs for their participants. Key findings include: Secure Jobs participants who enroll in skills training programs are comparable to those who do not, and they show moderate employment gains, most notably in job retention. Secure Jobs participants choose training programs in subjects ranging from health care to manufacturing. About half have chosen training in health care-related fields. Participants who enter training in traditionally female-dominated fields, including health care, sales, and service, are more likely to find employment than those in traditionally male-dominated fields such as construction and manufacturing.

Ready.gov’s Ready Campaign created a variety of informative advertisements and public service announcements for use in donated media space. Their collection of Preparedness Videos includes Alerts, Build-a-Kit videos, Communication Plans videos, and Preparedness videos for pets, persons with disabilities, military families, and the elderly. Selected videos are also available in Spanish.

While much attention is given to healthy family care of children, non-parental care is talked about far less. This October 16 webinar from the Annie E. Casey Foundation will be directed toward kin caregivers and professionals who work with kin caregivers. Presenters will focus on the ways in which kinship care can be different from nonrelative care and on helping relatives navigate children’s emotions around their parents in a healthy way. For more information on Annie E. Casey Foundation resources for kinship families and professionals, visit the webinar registration page or the foundation’s website.

The 2016 FEMA Youth Preparedness Catalog compiles programs and possible partnerships to get involved with or to support, along with providing curricula and resources for developing youth preparedness programs. These youth-tailored programs range across national, state, and local areas.

This U.S. Department of Health and Human Services blog post highlights Bethany Christian Services (BCS), an organization dedicated to helping foster children transition into adulthood. Using evidence-based curriculum, BCS offers workforce development skills and workforce stipend experiences to youth in foster care, while also providing information on life skills, including pregnancy prevention, career path education, budgeting, resume development, and more. Participants are assigned a case manager to guide them, answer questions about the transition to adulthood, and help them build self-confidence and self-sufficiency. To learn more about BCS or other pregnancy prevention programs funded through the Family and Youth Services Bureau, visit their website.

The Disaster Recovery Services by Career OneStop includes state resources, along with a general national resource guide. The Toolkit contains a Resource and Social Services Finder for disaster assistance and a page that provides U.S. Department of Labor aid resources for general disaster recovery.

This bulletin, from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, provides an overview of the literature around disaster preparedness, response, and recovery for low-income populations, and the vulnerability of communities and families with low socioeconomic status. The bulletin explores differences between these populations compared to others regarding preparedness prior to a disaster, response to official communication/warnings as well as the impact post-disaster has on housing, physical effects like injuries, financial recovery, difficulty with obtaining and receiving aid, depression, and posttraumatic stress.