Skip to main content

Home/ Domestic Poverty Analytics/ Group items tagged prison

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Coonoor Behal

What Strategies Work for the Hard-to-Employ? | mdrc 2012 - 0 views

www.mdrc.org/at-strategies-work-hard-employ

behaviors barrierstowork employment MDRC ACF

shared by Coonoor Behal on 25 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Coonoor Behal on 25 Mar 13
     
    "In the context of a public safety net focused on limiting dependency and encouraging participation in the labor market, policymakers and researchers are especially interested in individuals who face obstacles to finding and keeping jobs. The Enhanced Services for the Hard-to-Employ (HtE) Demonstration and Evaluation Project was a 10-year study that evaluated innovative strategies aimed at improving employment and other outcomes for groups who face serious barriers to employment. The project was sponsored by the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, with additional funding from the U.S. Department of Labor. This report describes the HtE programs and summarizes the final results for each program. Additionally, it presents information for three sites from the ACF-sponsored Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) project where hard-to-employ populations were also targeted. Three of the eight models that are described here led to increases in employment. Two of the three - large-scale programs that provided temporary, subsidized "transitional" jobs to facilitate entry into the workforce for long-term welfare recipients in one program and for ex-prisoners in the other - produced only short-term gains in employment, driven mainly by the transitional jobs themselves. The third one - a welfare-to-work program that provided unpaid work experience, job placement, and education services to recipients with health conditions - had longer-term gains, increasing employment and reducing the amount of cash assistance received over four years. Promising findings were also observed in other sites. An early-childhood development program that was combined with services to boost parents' self-sufficiency increased employment and earnings for a subgroup of the study participants and increased the use of high-quality child care; the program for ex-prisoners mentioned abov
Coonoor Behal

The poor in America: In need of help | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...election-campaign-they-deserve

povertyprograms systemic

shared by Coonoor Behal on 19 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Mr Obama’s re-election and Democratic control of the Senate give federal anti-poverty programmes a level of security they would have lacked under a Romney administration. But America’s poor face systemic challenges beyond the aid of any single administration or programme.
  • Most counties exhibiting persistent poverty—meaning counties with poverty rates of 20% or higher, consistently, from 1990 to 2010—are indeed in rural America (see map).
  • For most, poverty will be a temporary condition; chronic poverty remains relatively rare. But it does seem to be growing more common.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Another problem which got worse during the crisis, but was growing beforehand, is suburban poverty.
  • As of 2008 more than a third of America’s poor live in suburbs.
  • The number of poor people living in the suburbs grew 53% between 2000 and 2010
  • The eightfold growth in the prison population from 1970 to 2010 has turned ever more poor decisions into poor lives.
  • Most poor children live in single-parent homes, and most families that are poor lack married parents.
  • The amount the federal government spends on food stamps hit a record $75.7 billion in the 2011 fiscal year—more than double the level of 2008. Enrolment in Medicaid, through which federal and state governments provide health care to low-income Americans, has grown every year since 2008, though its 2012 growth was the slowest since the recession began, and its spending grew at a lower level than enrolment because of federal and state cost-control measures. In 2011 states disbursed $113.3 billion in unemployment benefits to 9.9m recipients, as well as roughly $16.6 billion received in block grants as part of a federal programme called Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.
  • America is unusually reluctant, compared with other rich countries, about giving cash transfers to the poor.
  • Its benefits skew overwhelmingly toward families: the most a single person can claim is around $500, while a married couple with three or more dependent children can receive $5,000 or more. In 2010 $55 billion was paid out through the EITC, and $23 billion for the child tax credit.
1 - 3 of 3
Showing 20▼ items per page