Disasters do not differentiate between urban, suburban, and rural communities, but response efforts do. Rural and Native communities can get left out of all stages of preparing for disasters and recovering from them. Rural communities, particularly communities of color and those facing persistent poverty, are ill equipped for disasters and suffer through longer recovery processes. The Urban Institute hosted a webinar on April 19, 2022 to discuss how to improve support for rural and Native communities facing disasters. The conversation showcased examples of successful planning, response, and recovery initiatives and highlighted policy and program changes that can help rural communities.

Lack of access to food is a major concern when natural disasters strike. This blogpost outlines how the Disaster Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (D-SNAP) and other federal nutrition programs play a critical role in mitigating spikes in food insecurity during such challenging times. The discussion identifies how D-SNAP provides replacement benefits for SNAP households that lose food and extends benefits to many other households that would not ordinarily be eligible for SNAP. It also covers how SNAP waivers can be used to allow SNAP recipients to obtain replacement benefits, and identifies approaches to allow states to release commodity foods — used in the National School Lunch Program, The Emergency Food Assistance Program, and other federal programs — for mass feeding sites. Further, it notes how the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) can play a crucial role in low-income communities with WIC food package and redemption flexibilities, benefit replacement, and simplified income eligibility.

The Office of Family Assistance initiative, “Leveraging America’s Social and Economic Resilience TANF Learning Community” (LASER TLC), supported ten TANF Programs across the country as they worked to address the challenges of human service delivery in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and focused on improving and delivering more responsive services to their TANF families. This document shares the Chippewa Cree Tribe of the Rocky Boys Reservation’s journey during their participation in the 18-month learning community. The site journey conveys how their LASER TLC site team, along with support from their dedicated coaching team and application of the LI2 framework, contributed to developing their action plan and strategizing the implementation of their change agenda to benefit TANF families.

Children living in families with low incomes face an array of challenges that place them at much higher risk of experiencing poverty in adulthood as compared with other children. This cycle of intergenerational poverty poses an economic disadvantage to not only the children and their families but also the nation. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) will host a webinar on September 21, 2023 from 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. ET on the NASEM report entitled Reducing Intergenerational Poverty that examines the drivers of long-term, intergenerational poverty, identifies potential policies and programs to reduce it, addresses gaps in data and research, and highlights the disproportionate effect of disadvantage to different racial/ethnic groups. The webinar will include a discussion of the report's key findings and questions from webinar participants.

Columbia University's Center on Poverty and Social Policy will co-host a virtual session on September 21, 2023 from 1:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. EDT to discuss the policy takeaways from the COVID-19 pandemic for reducing poverty and promoting economic well-being moving forward. This webinar will include a policy panel to discuss the challenges faced by low-income households, how the federal government achieved a record-low poverty rate in 2020 and again in 2021, and what lessons ought to be carried forward from those experiences.

Child Trends will host a virtual session on September 20, 2023 at 2:00 p.m. EDT to unpack a decades-long decline in child poverty and more recent shifts that followed COVID-19 aid to probe how well common poverty indicators have captured changes in child and family well-being. This webinar will include a panel representing research, advocacy, direct service, philanthropy, and human services that will discuss what it takes to build a social safety net focused on economic well-being rather than poverty.

The challenge of attracting and retaining a diverse, productive, engaged workforce has grown. Workers seek quality jobs, and companies that prioritize job quality become employers of choice. Job quality is not just about the job; it is a combination of key drivers that are important to each worker’s overall employment experience. This Job Quality Toolkit, issued by the U.S. Department of Commerce, is an actionable tool for organizations to improve the quality of the jobs they offer. Identifying and improving the drivers most valued by workers can significantly increase their satisfaction and engagement and, in turn, improve the organization’s ability to compete for talent and achieve success in the marketplace.

The Welfare and Family Self-Sufficiency Learning Agenda (WFSSLA) was developed by the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation’s Division of Economic Independence and the Office of Family Assistance (OFA). It guides the development and execution of the Division and OFA’s activities to learn how TANF and other human services best support the self-sufficiency and economic well-being of children and families with low incomes. The WFSSLA includes briefs for workstreams, or focal domains, to build knowledge about effectively fostering family economic security, stability, and self-sufficiency. Each brief synthesizes learning to date in that area based on key Division of Economic Independence projects; discusses select remaining gaps in knowledge; lists learning questions to inform future learning activities; and includes a table listing current Division projects pertaining to the workstream.

The Skills and Experience for the Careers of Tomorrow (SECTOR) program provides employment and training services, cognitive behavioral interventions, and connections to mental health and substance use disorder services for people with previous legal system involvement. It uses a sector-based approach, which connects individuals to training opportunities that offer a livable wage, career advancement opportunities, and benefits for job seekers. The model anticipates that behavioral health, well-being, employment, and earnings improvements will reduce future interactions with the criminal legal system. This MDRC report presents the findings of the SECTOR program evaluation as part of the Los Angeles County Reentry Integrated Services Project. The evaluation focuses mainly on employment and criminal legal system contact and whether SECTOR successfully connects individuals to mental health and substance use disorder services.