Autistic adults in need of long-term services and supports spend months on waiting lists before receiving such services through Medicaid. Data from a state-wide survey of adults and their caregivers on a waiting list for autism waivers suggest that the majority have unmet needs for functional skills services (63.6%), employment or vocation…

Los Angeles County's experience, write Christina Altmayer and Barbara Andrade DuBransky, shows how a universal offer of assistance can establish a foundation on which public and private agencies can plan meaningful systemic reform--and spark incentives for greater, more effective investments in services directed to vulnerable families. The…

Because education is the only system that reaches nearly all young people in this country, the education system is well positioned to act as a through-line for children and youth experiencing traumatic life circumstances. This paper offers a new framework for approaching cross-agency coordination which places the education system at the center.…

Children and families from a refugee background seem to escape the technical view usually adopted by educational and health practitioners, which is based on a mixture of diagnostic tests and special needs policies. This approach struggles to cope with the multiple needs -- in terms of health, culture, language, and learning -- involved in taking…

Background: Social workers play a central role in service delivery for parents with intellectual disability (ID). Within Israeli Muslim society, men with ID are likely to marry non-disabled women and create families. This study adds to scarce research on how social workers view these families, and how they might better serve their needs. Method: A…

This post is one in a series highlighting MDRC's methodological work. Contributors discuss the refinement and practical use of research methods being employed across the organization. Across policy domains, practitioners and researchers are benefiting from a trend of greater access to both more detailed and frequent data and the increased…

People with learning disabilities are among the most socially excluded in society. There is a significant gap in research evidence showing how health and social care workers can intervene to improve the social participation of adults with learning disabilities. A systematic review and modified narrative synthesis was used to appraise the quality…

Changes in the living circumstances of people with learning disabilities have seen responsibility for their health become the provenance of paid-and family-carers. Thirteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with three family-carers and ten paid-carers. Findings revealed that the role of these carers was undefined, leading to difficulty in…

Background/Objectives: The main objective of the article is to study, analyze and organize the modern German experience in the sphere of social pedagogical and educational work with socially unprotected adults, including youth and the elderly. The retrospective analysis threw light on the background of work with socially unprotected adults in…

As states work to strengthen supports for young children's mental health, often with the goal of reducing the incidence of costly conditions at later ages, they face the question of how to finance new or expanded services. This brief examines states' use of Medicaid as a key source of funding for early childhood mental health (ECMH) services. It…

Single Stop U.S.A.'s Community College Initiative was designed to improve the well-being of low-income communities by connecting individuals to public benefits and other institutional and community resources to address nonacademic barriers to college completion. Through offices located on community college campuses, Single Stop provides students…

This study examined the effectiveness of online education to providers who serve people experiencing homelessness, comparing online and face-to-face training of Critical Time Intervention (CTI), an evidence-based case management model. The authors recruited 184 staff from nineteen homeless service agencies to participate in one of two training…

This evaluation of the Case Management Partnership Initiative (CPMI) found that the program successfully linked high-need families with services designed to prevent truancy. The truancy prevention program, implemented at Anacostia and Ballou High Schools in 2011-2012, links chronically truant ninth graders and their families to social services and…

Evidence-based practice (EBP) has emerged as an alternative to traditional social work practice and has ignited a new round in the decades-old debate about the relationship between knowledge and practice in the field. This article identifies several limitations inherent in the EBP perspective and argues that it would be unfortunate if EBP were to…

Objectives: This article presents the validation of the 28-item Child and Youth Resilience Measure (CYRM-28) among two Canadian samples of youth with complex needs. Method: The CYRM-28 was administered to two groups of concurrent service using youth in Atlantic Canada (n[subscript 1] = 497; n[subscript 2] = 410) allowing for use of exploratory and…