The study directs attention away from urban poverty to the nation's rural poor and how they are served by five public assistance programs: Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and its Unemployed Fathers Component (AFDC-UF), Supplementary Security Income (SSI), Food Stamps (FS), and General Assistance. The 41% of the nation's poor who…

A study examined effects of the Self-Sufficiency Project (SSP) Plus program. A small group of long-term income assistance (IA) recipients in New Brunswick was offered an earnings supplement and employment services (SSP Plus); a second group was offered the regular SSP earnings supplement only; and a third group was offered neither supplement nor…

A net impact evaluation was conducted of the Ohio JOBS (Job Opportunities and Basic Skills) Student Retention Program (JSRP) pursued by some JOBS program clients to fulfill their responsibilities and receive federal aid. JSRP was a support program designed to assist entry to and success in programs of study at two-year community or technical…

This report on the early implementation of the Texas Job Opportunities and Basic Skills (JOBS) program and its impact on participants begins with an executive summary. An introduction outlines key research questions, components, and timelines. Section II covers program design and implementation and substate variations. The next five sections…

This report explores promising welfare-to-work programs and practices of states and localities as they balance supply- with demand-side strategies to help welfare recipients and low-wage workers work their way out of poverty while meeting employers' needs for reliable workers. Chapter 2 describes the new environment created by changes in the…

This paper poses a question of direct relevance for welfare administrators, program operators, and policy makers: What management practices, program strategies, and local conditions are key to running effective welfare-to-work programs? To address this question, the present analysis links detailed measures of program characteristics to valid and…

This paper reports results of a baseline analysis of Job Training Partnership Act-welfare coordination efforts in Texas. Following an introduction, section II provides a brief overview of the literature on welfare dynamics and program participation and describes Texas programs to move Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) recipients into…

This study was conducted to determine how many workers are in low-wage jobs; their characteristics and changes in their characteristics over time; the characteristics of the low-wage jobs; gender, sex, and racial factors influencing participation in low-wage jobs; and the relationship of low-wage work to family poverty and welfare receipt. The…

An evaluation of Jobs First (JF) compared the experiences of JF participants who were subject to welfare reform policies with those of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) participants who were subject to prior welfare rules. It collected information for four years about JF's impacts on participants' children and analyzed its financial…

Connecticut's Jobs First program, which began operating in January 1996, combines a time limit on welfare receipt with generous financial work incentives and requires recipients to participate in employment-related services targeted toward rapid job placement. The impacts of the Jobs First program were examined by following several thousand…

This report examines implementation and impacts of Ramsey County's Minnesota Family Investment Program (MFIP), a "work first" program. Chapter 1 lists key findings, provides an overview of the Ramsey County variant (MFIP-R) evaluation, and policy relevance of MFIP-R. Chapter 2 describes key features of MFIP-R and compares them with…

This document describes the resettlement of Hmong refugees in Orange County, California: what their employment experience has been, which resettlement efforts have been successful, and how current efforts could be altered to improve the Hmong's long term adjustment. The report is part of a larger, national project on Hmong resettlement. Much of…

The characteristics, earnings, employment experiences, and material well-being of California welfare recipients after leaving welfare were examined by comparing the postwelfare experiences of groups who exited welfare before and after institution of California's welfare reform program CalWORKs. The first group (pre-CalWORKs group) exited welfare…

The New Hope Project in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was developed to reduce poverty and reform welfare by providing adults who are willing to work least 30 hours per week with the following: help obtaining a job, including time-limited, minimum wage community service jobs (CSJ) if full-time employment was not otherwise available; a monthly earnings…

This booklet, which is designed to clarify facts regarding the minimum wage's impact on marketplace economics, contains a total of 31 questions and answers pertaining to the following topics: relationship between minimum wages and poverty; impacts of changes in the minimum wage on welfare reform; and possible effects of changes in the minimum wage…