This is the first of two messages from the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Office of Special Needs Assistance Programs and highlights recent progress in combatting family homelessness and HUD’s future priorities. The resource provides practitioners and stakeholders with steps they can take to end family homelessness by 2020. These actions include using data to evaluate resources, maximizing emergency shelters, eliminating barriers, and tailoring assistance to the unique needs of families.

This video from the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s KIDS COUNT Data Center shows how the data center provides critical information about children and families to stakeholders, including federal and state legislators, advocates, activists, journalists, and community members. The data can be sorted by state, county, city, congressional district, school district, and nationwide. The KIDS COUNT Data Center empowers its users to make a difference in the lives of families and children across the country.

This post, published on July 1, 2015, marks the day that many of the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) provisions begin to take effect. The goals of the joint vision between the Departments of Health and Human Services, Labor, and Education are to: ensure the needs of business and workers drive workforce solutions, guarantee American Job Centers provide excellent customer service to jobseekers and employers, and have the workforce system support strong regional economies and play an active role in community and economic development.

For several decades, obtaining a General Educational Development (GED) certificate was the most commonly recognized and widely available High School Equivalency (HSE) option in the U.S. But since January 2014, the content and process for obtaining an HSE credential in the U.S. has changed significantly. There are new state-endorsed equivalency options for individuals, and these changes, along with modifications to the GED, have profound implications for individuals seeking an HSE credential, as well as for postsecondary institutions and employers. This report explains the issues and provides practitioners with improvement strategies for their own programs.

This report from the Office of Career, Technical, and Adult Education (OCTAE) examines the implementation of OCTAE's correctional education reentry model at three demonstration sites: Barton Community College in Kansas, Lancaster Lebanon Intermediate Unit 13 in Pennsylvania, and Western Technical College in Wisconsin. It also identifies lessons for linking facility-based and community-based reentry education programs. The study showed that focusing on transitions in and out of correctional facilities and providing career pathways programs may significantly enable incarcerated individuals to continue their education and prepare for better jobs.

Disadvantaged U.S. workers with limited work experience often have difficulty finding and keeping gainful employment. Targeted employment and training interventions can help this population rise up in the labor market and improve their employment and earning potential. The Employment Strategies for Low-Income Adults Evidence Review (ESER) is a review of research on employment and training programs for low-income individuals. The review aims to identify programs and services that help low-income adults get and keep jobs and become self-sufficient.

The Maryland Administrative Office of the Courts has released this report, which presents the results of a study of three geographically diverse teen courts in Maryland. The study found that youth in each jurisdiction who completed a teen court program had fewer instances of recidivism than youth who did not complete the program.

This blog post was written by an employee at the Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) and describes her childhood experience with child support. She highlights the work of OCSE, including their recent Child Support Report newsletter, and how the agency has improved exponentially throughout the past decades.

This report from the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation describes the programmatic factors within the current TANF environment that may influence the numbers of work-eligible individuals or families with zero reported hours of participation. Additionally, the report highlights promising strategies used by state and local TANF agencies to encourage client engagement.

The Office of Family Assistance (OFA) has posted Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) caseload and application data for the fiscal year and current year of 2014. Also posted are the caseload and application data for the first quarter of fiscal year 2015.