The Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin at Madison will host a webinar on April 1, 2020 from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. CT to discuss the relationships that human services programs develop with the participants they serve, as well as the relationships that programs help participants develop outside their organizations. Speakers from the Yale Schools of Medicine and Public Health, the School of Government at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services will discuss the measurement and evaluation of building program participants’ social capital and the value of logic models for documenting social capital inputs, activities, and outputs. The webinar will also feature a program that tracks social capital to support programming in human services administration.

The U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Assistance seeks applications for technical assistance and training providers for Second Chance Act (SCA) grantees to improve reentry and reduce recidivism. Providers are sought to support site-based SCA grantees in one of the following three categories of technical assistance: Corrections and Community Engagement; Education, Employment, and Community Engagement; and Behavioral Health, Housing, and Family Support. Submissions are due by April 28, 2020.

The U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Assistance has announced a grant funding opportunity for projects that establish, expand, and improve treatment for individuals with substance use disorders during incarceration and reentry into the community. Applications are due by April 27, 2020.

The U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Assistance has announced a grant funding opportunity for state, local, and tribal community supervision agencies to develop and test new or enhanced applications of the swift, certain, and fair (SCF) principles of intervention to reduce recidivism and improve outcomes for individuals under community supervision. The SCF principles of intervention reflect:

• Swiftness—responding to behavior quickly so those under supervision relate the response to their behavior.

• Certainty—ensuring that sanctions and rewards are applied consistently and predictably.

• Fairness—making sanctions and rewards proportional to negative and positive behavior respectively. Applications are due by April 28, 2020.

The U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Assistance has announced a grant funding opportunity under the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA). Applications are sought for projects designed to prevent, detect, and respond to sexual abuse and sexual harassment in prisons, and to achieve and maintain compliance with PREA standards. Applications are due by April 14, 2020.

This brief identifies challenges for addressing families in rural areas who fall within the child welfare system and who also encounter substance misuse. It also illustrates several challenges that include a lack of family-centered options as well as transportation and technological limitations in addressing the needs of parents with substance abuse. The brief also points out the need for collaboration in rural areas between child welfare agencies and substance use treatment providers.

This research to practice brief identifies a set of established, promising, and developing practices that serve to improve low-income families’ economic well-being comprehensively. The practices cover financial security, workforce development, housing, and case management and highlight research on each area’s benchmarks and measures of success and the organizations that are engaged in these programmatic areas.

Initiating and maintaining improvements in early care and education (ECE) programs can be challenging, due to factors such as staffing shortages, turnover, and ineffective organizational structures. To address this challenge, the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE) funded the Culture of Continuous Learning (CCL) Project, which tests the feasibility of initiating a Breakthrough Series Collaborative (BSC) in child care and Head Start programs that serve children from diverse income and racial/ethnic backgrounds. This OPRE Issue Brief illustrates how and why the BSC is anticipated to support improvements and the factors facilitating long-term change.

This Child Trends brief assesses state-level efforts to create data infrastructure and integration of home visiting and early childhood data systems. The brief highlights strategies and examples for state leaders to use in planning for costs of integrating data pertaining to home visiting and other early childhood issues. Decision makers can use this information to answer questions about access to early childhood services and to track the outcomes of children who utilize these services.

This U.S. Department of Labor policy brief reviews approaches to incorporate Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Employment and Training (SNAP E&T) services into career pathway programs at the state level. These approaches include selecting SNAP E&T partners already offering career pathway services to SNAP participants and helping the partners expand their reach, and collaborating with SNAP E&T partners in filling service delivery gaps. Integrating SNAP E&T services and participants into career pathways may strengthen SNAP E & T’s alignment with the workforce system, which is a priority under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA).