This issue brief explores emerging efforts to meet the needs of infants and toddlers in low-income families. It highlights general strategies that states and localities can use to promote the healthy development of infants and toddlers in the context of promoting parental economic self-sufficiency. These strategies are illustrated with examples of…

The Workforce Investment Act of 1998 (WIA) makes it possible to build human capital resources by providing employment services and training to youth and adult dislocated workers. Such services are particularly needed in the rural South, where those affected by welfare reform have few job skills or educational credentials. WIA calls for the…

Notes that many from across the ideological spectrum suggest that welfare reform address policies that promote marriage and two-parent families. Discusses marriage, family structure and economic well-being, the benefits of marriage for adults and children, and low-income unwed mothers and marriage. Suggests that marriage and two-parent families…

Noting that the mid-1990s are an era of experimentation in welfare initiatives, this publication summarizes 34 research studies on children and welfare reform. Articles include studies of children and parents in poverty, studies of program models likely to have direct implications for children, and outcome evaluations of welfare-to-work programs…

Concerned with the increasing feminization of poverty, the Rockefeller Foundation launched in 1982 a $12 million welfare-to-work research and demonstration project, presently midway into a 5-year evaluation. The Minority Female Single Parent Demonstration project involved four community-based organizations: Atlanta Urban League (Georgia);…

The study determined the relation between specific social factors and situational conditions of poverty and non-poverty heads of households and their orientation toward work. The major hypotheses tested was that respondents affected more by adverse social factors and situational conditions will develop less positive work orientations. Data were…

The University of Chicago's Chapin Hall Center for Children evaluated the progress of the Making the Most of Out-of-School Time (MOST) Initiative in Boston, Chicago, and Seattle. MOST's goals are to improve the supply, accessibility, affordability and quality of school-age care, especially for low-income children; and to strengthen the overall…

Public investment in technical assistance to limited-resource farmers may be completely consistent with hard-headed taxpayer self-interest, because such investment provides a way for the impoverished to raise their incomes so they will no longer draw public-assistance benefits and will contribute more to financing public services by paying…

The paper explores whether the taxpaying public and limited-resource farm families who receive public welfare assistance to supplement meager farm incomes would be better off if some of these welfare funds were used to help the farmers help themselves by more efficient and profitable use of their farm resources. Data from an eastern Kentucky…

Today, many jobs that once could support a family barely suffice to keep that family out of poverty. The implied bargain America offers its citizens is supposed to be that anyone who works hard and plays by the rules can support his or her family and move onward and upward. But for millions of New Yorkers, that bargain is out of reach; the uphill…

Multi-year applied research studied operations and outcomes of six employment initiatives that developed industry-based approaches to workforce development. Findings from the longitudinal survey of 732 individuals indicated participants in sectoral programs improved their position within local labor markets; increased wages, hours worked, and…

The first findings of an evaluation of California's welfare-to-work program, Greater Avenues for Independence (GAIN), related to its impact on employment, earnings, and welfare payments. The impact results came from a study of applicants for and recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) in six counties and were limited to the…

Conceptual models developed from dropout research on traditional, residential college students were applied to the study of nontraditional students (older, mostly minority women on welfare) enrolled in a postsecondary, nondegree program (the federal Work Incentive Program). Factors that differentiate persisters from those who withdraw were…

The study's objective were: (1) to describe the patterns of work and welfare experience in low-income families and to explain their causes, and (2) to apply the findings to the policy problem of deciding which groups of welfare recipients should be required to work and provided with what mix of manpower services. The effectiveness of work…

This report examines data from a study of the relationship among work status, wage levels, marital status, education, age of youngest child and use of child care in allowing low income households to remain off welfare. The study described looking separately at public assistance status (whether a household received welfare) and recidivism (how long…