Poverty & Income Dynamics

This brief presents considerations for program administrators and other practitioners around increasing the use of primary prevention in human services systems to shift from responding to families after they are in crisis to preventing the crisis before it occurs.

This brief provides key considerations for policy designers and funding partners—such as federal staff, technical experts, and philanthropic partners—on incorporating primary prevention into human services delivery.

This brief highlights a new way of delivering primary prevention services that promotes equity by relying on the guidance and leadership of people with lived experience. The policy designers and service providers behind prevention services should have lived experience and/or co-create these services with people who do.

This report provides welfare dependence indicators through 2019 for most indicators and through 2020 for other indicators, reflecting changes that have taken place since enactment of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) in 1996.

Safety net programs provide critical support to people during times of economic hardship. Yet the reach and coverage of the safety net, particularly in times of increased need and among economically disadvantaged groups, is not well understood. The U.S.

This brief highlights key themes and ideas from a Health and Human Services (HHS) Convening on Advancing Primary Prevention in Human Services in August 2022. With a particular focus on prevention of youth and family homelessness, the convening featured the perspectives of academic experts, program administrators, federal colleagues, and people with lived expertise.

Many human services programs recognize the power of “social capital,” or the value that arises from relationships. This report offers insight into how programs use peer supports to help build social capital with participants who are reentering the community after incarceration or are survivors of intimate partner violence or sex trafficking.

To get a clear picture of how federal economic stimulus in 2021 supported people struggling economically, we projected how many people are in poverty in 2021 compared with 2019, before the pandemic. We also project the reduction in poverty related to stimulus efforts in 2021.

The COVID-19 crisis has disparately harmed low-income households. Across the United States, systemic inequalities in employment, wage-earning, health, and well-being have been strained for sub-populations facing poverty or near-poverty conditions.

In focus group discussions with 44 working parents receiving assistance from one or more federal programs, many parents shared the view that increasing earnings involves a number of risks. Participants described the sequence of possible risk events as follows: