Kent County

This report summarizes the implementation and evaluation of the Accelerating Connections to Employment (ACE) program. The ACE program model is designed to improve employment and employment-related outcomes for low-skilled workers through formal partnerships between Workforce Investment Boards (WIBs) and community colleges. Implemented at nine sites across four states (Maryland, Texas, Connecticut and Georgia) from 2012 to 2015, ACE provided training, support services, job readiness and job placement support to 1,258 participants.

Studies since the 1996 welfare reform found caseload reductions yet little improvements in well being. This article provides qualitative analysis of program experiences a decade later. From telephone interviews of Michigan recipients, the authors observed that respondents identify one of four combinations of needs for services. They highlighted unmet needs for further education, health-related challenges, interim unemployment-related services, or concrete help with cyclical low wage work.

Parents’ Fair Share (PFS) research on child support enforcement has several goals. First, it seeks to provide insights into the interaction between local child support enforcement systems and noncustodial parents whose children are on welfare. The approach taken in this report is to analyze what happened when the seven sites in the PFS Demonstration sought to identify low-income, unemployed noncustodial parents appropriate for PFS and refer them to the program. The report carries this story up to the point of referral of appropriate noncustodial parents to the program.

This paper uses data from 2 randomized evaluations of welfare-to-work programs—the Minnesota Family Investment Program and the National Evaluation of Welfare-to-Work Strategies—to estimate the effect of employment on domestic abuse among low-income single mothers. Unique to our analysis is the application of a 2-stage least squares method, in which random assignment enables us to control for omitted characteristics that might otherwise confound the association between employment and domestic abuse.

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 changed cash welfare from a system of income maintenance as an entitlement to low-income families to one in which assistance to families is both limited and temporary, and in which work and economic self-sufficiency are emphasized. The emerging emphasis on work has led many states to significantly narrow the exemptions from welfare-related work requirements.