Family Support Topics

• Strengthening Families
• Focusing on Youth
• Understanding TANF
• Clients

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Rural Welfare-to-Work Strategies: Helping to Shape Rural Policy

Finding successful approaches to addressing rural residents' employment challenges and helping them find and sustain employment and move toward self-sufficiency is a critical step in welfare and family support policy. Implementing welfare-to-work (WtW) programs in rural areas can present challenges. Many rural areas have higher poverty rates than urban areas, often affecting generations of families. Reliable transportation may be especially important, since jobs are further away, and crucial social and educational services may not be nearby. Child care options may be limited and hard to arrange. Furthermore, many rural residents are employed in low-skill, low-wage jobs.

Using random assignment experiments, we evaluated two programs that offered innovative services to promote employment and economic independence among the rural poor: 

• Building Nebraska Families, a home visitation and life skills education program that teamed the state welfare agency with the University of Nebraska Cooperative Extension, was designed to improve the basic life skills and job readiness of hard-to-employ TANF recipients.
• Illinois Future Steps, an employment-focused case management program that teamed the welfare agency with a regional community college was designed to prepare TANF and food stamp recipients and other low-income people for work and help them find and keep good jobs.

Our study offers findings and lessons to help shape future policy and program development in other states and localities.  

The Evaluation

The evaluation consisted of several interconnected parts, conducted separately for each of the two programs: (1) an impact study that rigorously assessed effects of the program on participants' employment and other outcomes by drawing on baseline and follow-up survey data, and state administrative records data; (2) an in-depth process study that identified implementation issues and challenges and provided details on how programs operated and achieved observed results; (3) a program cost study; and (4) for the Building Nebraska Families evaluation, a cost-benefit study.

Findings

For the Building Nebraska Families program, we found that the program improved employment near the end of the 30-month followup and significantly improved family income and reduced poverty. It also had major impacts for a subgroup of more disadvantaged clients with multiple obstacles. For this subgroup, large impacts on employment and earnings were observed. The impacts on earnings grew during much of the 30-month follow-up period and were particularly robust during its last six months, when the program group earned 56 percent more than the control group, about $200 more per month. The more disadvantaged program group members, compared to the more disadvantaged control group members, also had substantially higher family income and were less likely to be living in poverty at the time of the 30-month followup. Building Nebraska Families’ benefits to society did not outweigh its costs during the follow-up period. Still, for the more disadvantaged subgroup, projections indicate that if average earnings impacts in the last six months of the 30-month followup persist, the program would pay for itself—that is, positive net benefits would result—in less than two additional years after the 30-month followup.

For the Illinois Future Steps program, the evaluation found that the program had few positive impacts on the employment, self-sufficiency, and well-being of low-income people in rural Illinois. Implementation challenges confounded Future Steps’ efforts to provide an intervention that truly went beyond case management. Foremost among these problems were limited ties with local employers and difficulty retaining and supporting qualified staff. Moreover, the program was not able to capitalize on the job-training resources and employer connections available through its community college partner. In addition, while case management may have helped clients address some barriers to work and self-sufficiency, many obstacles remained, at least some of which may be structural in nature, such as the limited availability of jobs and public transportation.

Publications

"Teaching Self-Sufficiency Through Home Visitation and Life Skills Education." Trends in Family Programs and Policy, Issue Brief #3 (July 2009)
"Teaching Self-Sufficiency: An Impact and Benefit-Cost Analysis of a Home Visitation and Life Skills Education Program" (September 2008)
"Testing Case Management in a Rural Context: An Impact Analysis of the Illinois Future Steps Program" (September 2008)
"The Impacts of a Home Visitation and Life Skills Education Program for Hard-to-Employ TANF Recipients: Findings from the Rural Welfare-to-Work Evaluation" (November 2006)
"Paths to Work in Rural Places: Key Findings and Lessons from the Impact Evaluation of the Future Steps Rural Welfare-to-Work Program" (March 2006)
"Implementing Welfare-to-Work Programs in Rural Places: Lessons from the Rural Welfare-to-Work Strategies Demonstration Evaluation" (April 2004)
"Rural Welfare-to-Work Strategies Demonstration Evaluation: A Summary of the Evaluation Design and Demonstration Programs" (October 2002)