The Austin Guaranteed Income Pilot is testing how direct cash might help individuals and families with low incomes weather their unstable housing circumstances in some of the highest-poverty and most rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods in Austin, Texas. In September 2022, UpTogether and 10 community-based partners enrolled 135 households to receive $1,000 per month for one year. This fact sheet focuses on participants’ goals and uses for the cash disbursements they have received so far in the pilot. The factsheet uses data from baseline and six-month surveys, as well as information from participant interviews.

The Austin Guaranteed Income Pilot is testing how direct cash might help individuals and families with low incomes weather their unstable housing circumstances in some of the highest-poverty and most rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods in Austin, Texas. In September 2022, UpTogether and 10 community-based partners enrolled 135 households to receive $1,000 per month for one year. This fact sheet draws from survey data at baseline and six months into the program, as well as participant interviews, to present a snapshot of preliminary outcomes.

Healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) programs can struggle to recruit and enroll participants. This is often the first challenge new programs encounter as they move from planning to implementing their services. Because of this challenge, an important component of many successful recruitment strategies is to develop partnerships with other organizations in the community that can refer potential participants. This brief identifies partnership tips from Anthem Strong Families (Dallas), Family Service Agency-Santa Barbara, and Gateway Community Action (West Liberty, Kentucky); each of these organizations are HMRE grant recipients who participated in rapid cycle learning to strengthen their recruitment partnerships.

In Austin/Travis County, there is a substantial gap between the need for and supply of nontraditional-hour child care, with only about 2,000 regulated child care slots (or about 4 percent of existing regulated supply) that are licensed to provide child care during nontraditional hours -- before 7:00 a.m. and after 6:00 p.m. during the traditional workweek and anytime on weekends. This report presents findings from interviews, focus groups, and analyses of survey and administrative data to describe nontraditional-hour child care demand, supply, and preferences. Two of the report’s findings are: 1) the potential demand for nontraditional-hour child care is higher among groups facing structural barriers to opportunities and 2) an inadequate supply of nontraditional-hour child care has decreased families’ financial well-being and businesses’ ability to access talented employees.

Some healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) programs offer economic stability services in addition to relationship skills education. The Office of Family Assistance (OFA) funds community-based programs that offer HMRE and economic stability services as part of their Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood grant programs. This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation brief offers lessons for HMRE program providers seeking to integrate HMRE and economic stability services and examines two social service agencies that received federal grants from OFA —The Parenting Center in Fort Worth, Texas, and Family and Workforce Centers of America in St. Louis, Missouri—to design and implement such integrated programs.

In recent years, many healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) programs serving couples with low incomes have offered participants economic stability services in addition to traditional HMRE programming focused on relationship skills. The Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services (STREAMS) evaluation included an impact study of Empowering Families, an HMRE program with integrated economic stability services for couples with low incomes raising children together. The program was implemented by The Parenting Center, a community-based social services provider in Fort Worth, Texas. Empowering Families’ core service was an eight-session workshop that taught relationship skills integrated with content on employment and financial literacy. The program supplemented this workshop with one-on-one employment counseling and financial coaching services.

This brief explores how guaranteed income might address gaps and deficits in policies designed to address America’s housing affordability crisis. Less well documented in the research are the supplementary and comparative advantages of cash infusion vis-à-vis programs restricted to meeting basic needs, such as housing, food, and child care. This analysis of guaranteed income as a strategy to combat the affordable housing crisis cites secondary data from past experiments as well as current demonstrations that have released evaluation data. In addition to using secondary data, interviews were conducted with key stakeholders from three recent municipal guaranteed income pilots in Arlington, Virginia; Austin, Texas; and Chicago, Illinois.

This report summarizes the design and implementation of MyGoals for Employment Success (MyGoals), an experimental employment coaching demonstration program, launched in early 2017. The program aims to help recipients of housing assistance in Baltimore and Houston who are unemployed or working less than 20 hours a month set and achieve employment and related goals. Coaches follow a systematic process that focuses explicitly on self-regulation skills—the skills needed to finish tasks, stay organized, and control emotions. Financial incentives are offered for attending coaching sessions and achieving employment outcomes. MyGoals is one of four coaching interventions included in the Evaluation of Employment Coaching for TANF and Related Populations project.

Youth involved in both the child welfare and juvenile justice systems — sometimes referred to as crossover, dually-involved, dually-adjudicated, or dual-system youth — require a special focus. An intentional approach is needed because involvement in both systems is associated with higher risks for mental health, educational, and vocational challenges, higher rates of recidivism, longer stays in detention, and poorer placement stability and permanency outcomes. This blogpost illustrates the Crossover Youth Practice Model (CYPM) to address the needs of this population. It outlines the three phases of implementing the CYPM by identifying policies, programs, and practices that will enhance how a community supports crossover youth. More than 120 counties in 23 states have implemented or are in the process of implementing the CYPM as of 2022; the blogpost references reports on lessons learned in using this approach in Harris County, Texas, eastern Idaho, and Los Angeles County, California.

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.