The Aspen Institute’s Financial Security Program’s two-part Financial Resilience series will highlight the foundational role benefits play in supporting household financial resilience, elevate the insights and work of benefit leaders, and discuss the opportunities for scale and innovations needed in public benefits and workplace benefits. Part 2 of this webinar series, Modernizing Workplace Benefits to Support Financial Resilience, will take place on November 17, 2022 from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. EDT. This webinar will highlight a new framework for financial resilience which showcases the importance of workplace benefits in holistically supporting households to manage and mitigate the impact of financial shocks. Speakers will explore commitments by private sector leaders to support workers’ financial resilience and elevate the benefit innovators: investors, benefit providers and administrators, employees, and fintech. These innovators are currently leading the way to modernize workplace benefits and scale innovations to ensure all workers and their families are financially resilient. The first webinar occurred on October 13, 2022.

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Clearinghouse for Labor and Evaluation and Research (CLEAR) has been the agency’s flagship clearinghouse for the past 10 years with a mission to make labor research more accessible for use in decision-making. The CLEAR team conducts independent systematic reviews designed to identify and summarize high quality labor-related evaluation and research studies, answer “what works?” questions, and support evidence-based decision making on labor policies and programs.

In recognition of its 10-year milestone, the Department’s Chief Evaluation Officer will be conducting a series of three webinars which are designed to introduce or refresh stakeholders on what CLEAR is and how to use it. The first webinar in this series, CLEAR 101: An Introduction to CLEAR, will be held on October 25, 2002 from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. Webinar panelists will guide participants to learn CLEAR fundamentals and how to navigate CLEAR’s website and information. Subsequent webinars will be held on November 16, 2022 and December 13, 2022; updates will appear in upcoming PeerTA newsletters.

When it comes to cash transfer programs like welfare for single parents and especially mothers, most of the evaluation and economic modeling efforts have focused on how those programs impact the amount of paid work single parents do. However, there has been less attention to the value of parental time and how that matters for children’s development. This podcast from the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin at Madison features Joseph Mullins, an economist at the University of Minnesota, who developed an economic model for U.S. cash transfer programs that attempts to place an accurate value on parents’ time when assessing cash transfer programs.

Healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) programs aim to support the well-being of families by teaching them skills to improve communication and conflict management, how to recognize the characteristics of healthy romantic relationships, and how to strengthen existing relationships. HMRE programs may pair a relationship skills curriculum with other services, such as individualized job development or instruction on financial planning, that aim to promote economic stability or content on parenting skills. This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation brief describes typical patterns of participation in three programs that were part of the Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services (STREAMS) evaluation, a large multisite evaluation conducted from 2015 to 2022 to identify strategies for improving the delivery and effectiveness of healthy marriage and relationship education programs. The brief identifies distinct patterns of participation in each of these programs and provides profiles of the clients who participate in these distinct ways.

Domestic Violence Awareness Month (DVAM) was launched nationwide in October 1987 as a way to connect and unite individuals and organizations working on domestic violence issues while raising awareness for those issues. This toolkit from the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV) provides information, background, messaging, templates, and content to promote involvement in #DVAM2022 and express a commitment to seeing a national culture where we are all safe, empowered, and free from domestic violence.

The #WeAreResilient toolkit includes:

• Details about NCADV and DVAM
• Information about Domestic Violence (including graphics, links to blog posts and fact sheets, and online resources)
• Samples and Templates
• More Ways to #PowerUp with NCADV

The COVID-19 pandemic and its economic fallout have caused major disruptions for many workers and their families, particularly individuals working in jobs with low wages. This report and its accompanying brief summarize the experiences that 41 such workers shared during in-depth interviews, which examined how the respondents’ employment situations changed during the pandemic and the financial struggles they faced as a result of losing their job or having their work hours reduced. The stories and experiences workers share in the report and brief can help policymakers, employers, and programs that are interested in better supporting individuals with low incomes and their families.

This blogpost illustrates how newly released data from the U.S. Census Bureau reveal a major public policy success. The nation’s child poverty rate dropped by half in 2021, from an estimated 10% in 2020 to a historic low of 5%. This drop was primarily due to the expanded child tax credit (CTC), according to the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM). The SPM provides an opportunity to assess the effectiveness of government anti-poverty interventions by accounting for safety net benefits, including the expanded child tax credit as part of the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021. Based on Census Bureau data, the CTC lifted 2.9 million children out of poverty in 2021; one-third of these kids was under age 6.

Soft skills, also known as “noncognitive,” “employability,” “baseline,” or “twenty-first-century” skills, are the capabilities and habits that affect social-emotional abilities related to communication, social interactions, and problem-solving. This blogpost covers findings from a series of interviews with employers to gauge how they perceive the value and authority of soft-skills credentials and to learn what could increase their utility and credibility. Additionally, the blogpost notes that employers made clear that they value work and academic experiences that relate to candidates’ skills more than they value soft-skills credentials.

The once-in-a-generation financial disruption caused by COVID-19 was a massive stress test on the financial resilience of U.S. households. In response, policymakers, companies, nonprofits, and community leaders stepped up to support households in ways they never had before – through direct financial assistance, by closing critical gaps in workplace benefits, and with innovative solutions to improve the design and delivery of benefits.

The Aspen Institute’s Financial Security Program will host a two-part Financial Resilience series which will highlight the foundational role benefits play in supporting household financial resilience, elevate the insights and work of benefit leaders, and discuss the opportunities for scale and innovations needed in public benefits and workplace benefits. Part 1 of this webinar series, Modernizing Public Benefits, will take place on October 13, 2022 from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. ET. This webinar will highlight a new framework for financial resilience, elevate the work of federal, state, and nonprofit leaders currently paving the way to support household financial resilience by taking a people-centric approach to public benefits design and delivery, and explore opportunities for scaling these solutions to reach all households. Details on Part 2 of the webinar series, Modernizing Workplace Benefits on November 17, 2022, will be included in a future PeerTA newsletter.