Resource Library

The Breaking Barriers program, based in San Diego, California, provided employment services to lower-income individuals with disabilities. 

MDRC carried out a random assignment impact evaluation of the program, funded by the U.S. Department of Labor, in order to assess the effectiveness of the program at improving employment outcomes for program participants. Findings from that evaluation were released in September 2019...

Individual Placement and Support (IPS) is a model for helping people who have serious mental illness find employment. There is a good deal of evidence showing the model’s success, but less is known about the model’s effectiveness with those who have other types of disabilities and health conditions, such as physical disabilities or less severe types of mental illness...

The Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE), within the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has a long history of supporting rigorous research and evaluation on the broad range of human services programs that fall under ACF’s auspices. Many of ACF’s programs have components aimed at supporting employment among low-income populations, and, consequently, OPRE regularly supports...

The Health Profession Opportunity Grants (HPOG) Program is designed to provide education and training to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) recipients and other low-income individuals for occupations in the healthcare field that pay well and are expected to either experience labor shortages or be in high demand. A National Evaluation of 27 grants awarded in 2015 as part of the second round of HPOG grants (HPOG 2.0) is currently underway...

The Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project demonstrated the value of applying insights from behavioral science to improve the efficacy of human services programs. This infographic captures key elements of the project, highlights the behavioral techniques most commonly used in BIAS, and summarizes results across the BIAS experiments...

This brief explores fathers’ social support networks to learn about the size and composition of their family and friendship ties, the types of support they get through these connections, and the types of organizations from which the fathers receive services.

Findings indicate that fathers...

This portfolio of research provides detailed summaries of OPRE’s ongoing welfare and family self-sufficiency research efforts along with brief overviews of past projects. The featured projects cover topics that include TANF, the safety net, employment, education and training. The report also describes OPRE’s efforts to disseminate rigorous research on welfare and family self-sufficiency.  This year’s portfolio covers OPRE-funded projects for Fiscal Year 2013...

This report explains in detail the criteria that govern the Employment Strategies for Low-Income Adults Evidence Review (ESER), a systematic review of the literature on the effectiveness of employment and training programs for low-income adults. This detailed look includes the criteria for searching the literature, screening studies for eligibility, assessing each study’s strength of evidence, and extracting information reported in the studies...

This annual publication, using information from the Welfare Rules Database, provides tables containing key Temporary Assistance for Needy Families policies for each state as of July 2015, as well as longitudinal tables describing various state policies for selected years between 1996 and 2015...

A substantial skills gap exists between the education and training of the labor force and the needs of employers in many high growth industries, including healthcare and manufacturing. This gap results in unemployment while good paying jobs go unfilled. At the same time, many low-skilled adults persist in low wage work with little opportunity for advancement.

Career pathways programs, like the Pima Community College (PCC) Pathways to Healthcare HPOG programs, are an approach...