Moving from Jobs to Careers: Engaging Low-Wage Workers in Career Advancement

The Work Advancement and Support Center (WASC) demonstration offers a new approach to helping low-wage and dislocated workers advance by increasing their wages or work hours, upgrading their skills, or finding better jobs. At the same time, these workers are encouraged to augment and stabilize their income by making the most of available work supports, such as food stamps, public health insurance, subsidized child care, and tax credits. This report presents preliminary information on the effectiveness of strategies that were used to attract people to the WASC program and engage them in services

Toward Growth and Equality: A Framework for Monitoring Outcomes for Residents and Housing Markets in Camden and the South Jersey Region

This paper offers a framework for tracking the extent to which demographic, labor, and housing market conditions are moving in or out of alignment with a range of goals for redevelopment in Camden, New Jersey

From Getting By to Getting Ahead: Navigating Career Advancement for Low-Wage Workers

From just getting by at the end of each month to getting ahead is a hard climb for many low-wage workers. This report, from MDRC's Work Advancement and Support Center (WASC) demonstration, explores how WASC career coaches help low-wage workers understand the complex interactions between earnings and eligibility for work support programs and guide them to make the best advancement decisions possible

The Double Bind of Redevelopment: Camden During Receivership

This working paper finds that successful redevelopment efforts in Camden, New Jersey, under state receivership were able to build on groups' existing capacities and their past work in neighborhoods, were marked by more effective participatory dynamics and the limited use of eminent domain, and benefited from good relationships with the State of New Jersey and with private-sector partners. It concludes that attempts to build public capacity to revitalize cities may need to be complemented by efforts to build civic capacity, or the ability to solve problems in coordination with major partners

Welfare Time Limits: An Update on State Policies, Implementation, and Effects on Families

One of the most controversial features of the 1990s welfare reforms was the imposition of time limits on benefit receipt. This comprehensive review, written by The Lewin Group and MDRC, includes analyses of administrative data reported by states to the federal government, visits to several states, and a literature review

A global analysis approach for investigating structural resilience in urban drainage systems

Copyright © 2015 Elsevier. NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Water Research. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Water Research (2015), DOI: 10.1016/j.watres.2015.05.030Building resilience in urban drainage systems requires consideration of a wide range of threats that contribute to urban flooding. Existing hydraulic reliability based approaches have focused on quantifying functional failure caused by extreme rainfall or increase in dry weather flows that lead to hydraulic overloading of the system. Such approaches however, do not fully explore the full system failure scenario space due to exclusion of crucial threats such as equipment malfunction, pipe collapse and blockage that can also lead to urban flooding. In this research, a new analytical approach based on global resilience analysis is investigated and applied to systematically evaluate the performance of an urban drainage system when subjected to a wide range of structural failure scenarios resulting from random cumulative link failure. Link failure envelopes, which represent the resulting loss of system functionality (impacts) are determined by computing the upper and lower limits of the simulation results for total flood volume (failure magnitude) and average flood duration (failure duration) at each link failure level. A new resilience index that combines the failure magnitude and duration into a single metric is applied to quantify system residual functionality at each considered link failure level. With this approach, resilience has been tested and characterized for an existing urban drainage system in Kampala city, Uganda. In addition, the effectiveness of potential adaptation strategies in enhancing its resilience to cumulative link failure has been tested.UK Commonwealth PhD scholarshipEngineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (ESPRC) - Safe & SuRe research fellowshi

Who Are America's Poor Children? Examining Health Disparities Among Children in the United States

Good health goes a long way, as research suggests that poor health in childhood not only impedes early child development, but can also have lasting consequences on children's future health and wellbeing. Although many would agree that a health is a fundamental right, children born into low-income families are less likely to enjoy this right. As part of NCCP's Who are America's Poor Children? series, this report draws on the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) and the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) to provide an overview of the health of America's children by poverty status from 2007 to 2009. To assess health disparities between poor and nonpoor children, it identifies a list of publicly available annual indicators within the following five broad domains of health: environmental health, health insurance coverage, access to healthcare services, behavior, and health outcomes. We find evidence of disparities between poor and nonpoor children within each of these five domains. These findings are consistent with two longstanding conclusions within the field of public health. First, "the relationship between socioeconomic status and health is one of the most robust and well documented findings in social science." Second, this relationship is reciprocal, as poverty detracts from resources used to maintain health, while poor health detracts from the educational and employment paths to income mobility. Following a framework developed by the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics, this paper suggests five key domains of health: environmental health, health insurance coverage, access to healthcare services, behavior, and health outcomes. While income is one of the leading predictors of health disparities, it is not the only one (and often is associated with other risks). The influences of race and ethnicity, neighborhood safety and collective efficacy, family structure, and many other factors, are also critically important, though not examined here. With the exception of the two readily available survey indicators of reported emotional difficulties and attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, we do not examine indicators of social-emotional well-being and mental health

Who Are America's Poor Children? Examining Health Disparities by Race and Ethnicity

Good health in childhood both reflects and predicts full social and economic participation. Conversely, social divisions by race and income are often associated with health disparities, which inhibit children from achieving their full potential. Although many would agree that health is a fundamental right, children subject to exclusion by race and class are less likely to enjoy this right. An earlier report in the NCCP Who are America's Poor Children? series examined child health disparities by poverty status. In the introduction to that report two points were made. First, "the relationship between socioeconomic status and health is one of the most robust and well documented findings in social science." Second, the relationship is also reciprocal, as poverty detracts from resources used to maintain health, while poor health detracts from the educational and employment paths to income mobility. This report goes one step further to consider health disparities among poor children by race and ethnicity. As in the earlier report, it identifies a list of publicly available indicators found in the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) and the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). It examines selected disparities in six domains of health risk and health status: family composition and poverty, food insecurity, environmental conditions, health insurance coverage, access to healthcare services, and health outcomes. It offers a short introduction to a dozen indicators, explaining how each reflects one of the six dimensions of heath and how public policies might help to reduce relevant disparities. Intended for a generalist audience, this report summarizes and references primary research resources

Quantifying the Resilience of Urban Drainage Systems Using a Hydraulic Performance Assessment Approach

13th International Conference on Urban Drainage, Sarawak, Malaysian Borneo, 7-12 September 2014Although considerable progress has been made towards achieving sustainable urban water management, urban drainage systems (UDSs) are increasingly threatened by multiple and uncertain drivers of future change. Building the resilience of UDSs to flooding is increasingly recognised as an imperative to promoting the long term sustainability of the urban areas they serve. This paper describes a methodology that combines the use of hydraulic performance assessment with utility performance functions to quantify the resilience of UDSs during flooding (exceedance) conditions. Utility performance functions, which relate the overall UDS performance to flood depths, are derived from existing flood depth-damage data for UK residential properties for various rainfall return periods and are used to estimate UDS residual functionality and hence resilience to pluvial flooding. The study shows that by introducing a storage tank for flow attenuation, the duration of nodal flooding and the flooded volume can be reduced by 6 to 10% and 18 to 38%, respectively and the overall system resilience to flooding can be increased by 8.0 to 9.5%.UK Department for International Development (DFID) - Commonwealth PhD scholarship awardEPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) Safe & SuRe Project fellowshi

Statistical Downscaling Methods for Climate Change Impact Assessment on Urban Rainfall Extremes for Cities in Tropical Developing Countries – a Review

International Conference on Flood Resilience: Experiences in Asia and Europe, Exeter, UK, 5-7 September 2013Results of most global and regional climate model simulations cannot be directly applied in future change impacts and adaptation studies of urban drainage and flood risk management. A form of downscaling is required to increase the spatial and temporal resolution of the modelled rainfall data. This paper provides a critical review of the current state of the art statistical downscaling techniques that can be applied to quantify climate change impacts on urban rainfall extremes. Emphasis is placed on delta change methods and Poisson cluster stochastic rainfall models. The paper discusses the applicability and key limitations of statistical downscaling in climate impact and adaptation studies for cities in tropical developing countries. From the review, it can be concluded that simpler statistical downscaling techniques with modest resource requirements such as climate impact sensitivity analyses, use of simple Markov chain or semi-empirical models, construction of climate analogues and spatial interpolation of grid point data are appropriate for scoping of climate impacts and evaluation of mitigation and adaptation strategies at the city scale. Emerging resilience based approaches that combine both scenario based climate model projections and acceptability thresholds defined by key flood risk management stakeholders are promising for application in climate impact and adaptation studies for cities in tropical developing countries.UK Commonwealth Scholarship Commission - PhD scholarshi