Fostering Success for People Facing Barriers to Employment through SNAP Employment and Training:Promising Employment Program Models, Practices, and Principles for SNAP E&T Participants Facing Barriers to Employment

This brief provides information and resources about best and promising employment program models, practices, and principles for serving people facing significant barriers to employment in order to inform SNAP Employment & Training (E&T) state planning, partnerships, and implementation

Healthy Relationships, Employment, and Reentry

This brief will provide an overview of the evidence supporting the interrelatedness of employment, healthy relationships, family well-being, and recidivism. It will also give the perspectives of expert program practitioners who are successfully integrating programming related to employment, prison reentry, healthy relationships, and responsible fatherhood. Finally, this brief will offer program and policy recommendations for leveraging the positive impacts of healthy relationships on employment and reentry and vice versa

Relationships, Learning, and Motivation for One Virtual Literacy Camp during the COVID-19 Pandemic

This article focuses on one university literacy camp for kindergarten through sixth grade students that shifted from traditional in-person instruction to a virtual setting during the COVID-19 pandemic. The change from an in-person camp to a virtual camp setting created an opportunity for research in investigating students’ attitudes towards literacy, literacy learning, and participation within the newly formatted virtual literacy camp. Twenty-six kindergarten through sixth grade students were interviewed at the beginning and conclusion of a semester-long literacy camp regarding their attitudes toward learning and participation in the literacy camp. Throughout the data, researchers noted the theme of relationships as being prevalent with many participants sharing thoughts specifically in light of the lack of outside interaction during this more isolated era of time. The relationships built between the tutors and the students in this virtual camp were vital to the attitudes and the learning of these study participants. This study provides further direction for supporting students in a virtual literacy clinic setting

Impact of hospital design on acutely unwell patients with dementia

Increasing emphasis on patient privacy and satisfaction has seen more 100% single-room hospitals opened across the UK. Few studies have addressed the impact of these new hospital designs (single rooms) on clinical outcomes specifically for acutely unwell frail patients with dementia. The objective of this study was to profile and compare the clinical outcomes of acutely unwell patients with dementia admitted to two different hospital environments. This prospective observation study was conducted for 100 dementia patients admitted at Ysbyty Ystrad Fawr (hospital with 100% single rooms) and Royal Gwent Hospital (traditional multi-bed wards) under the same University Health Board. The length of stay (LoS) was significantly longer for patients admitted to single rooms. The clinical profile of the patients was similar in both hospitals and has no association with LoS. There was no significant difference in terms of incidence of inpatient falls, fall-related injury, discharge to a new care home, 30-day readmission, or mortality. The single room environment appears to influence LoS, as previously reported; however, following the introduction of quality improvement initiatives to prevent inpatient falls, single rooms do not appear to be associated with higher inpatient fall incidence. We propose more research to understand the relationship between single rooms and LoS

Framework for an Equity-Centered National Subsidized Employment Program

Developed in partnership with 16 national organizations, this framework lays out an equity-centered national subsidized employment program that can support an inclusive COVID-19 economic recovery. This framework describes a national subsidized employment program designed to quickly and efficiently get people working when it is safe to do so as well as ensure that people who have been left out of and left behind by our labor market have access to economic opportunity. This framework explicitly centers racial and gender equity.

Food Stamps for Felons? An Analysis of the Impact of Public Assistance Policy on Offender Recidivism Rates

Criminal justice reform is increasingly becoming a hot-button issue in public opinion discourse in the United States. This new wave of reforms is a response to decades of punitive policies that led to massive increases in US incarceration rates. In this thesis, I address one such policy: the lifetime ban on access to welfare benefits (TANF) and food stamps (SNAP) for drug felons after release from prison, passed as part of the welfare reforms of 1996. I collected data from states’ corrections departments in order to study the relationship between a given state’s level of implementation of the ban and its recidivism rates. I first perform a bivariate analysis of the aggregated recidivism data; then, I individually analyze six states (Alabama, California, Indiana, Massachusetts, New York, and Washington) to determine the effects of the TANF and SNAP bans. The limited nature of accessible criminal justice data did not allow me to find a causal relationship between these variables, but my results do suggest that more lenient public assistance accessibility for released offenders may be correlated with declines in recidivism rates.Bachelor of Art

Work Matters: Employment as a Tool for Preventing Homelessness and Improving Health

Poor health, unemployment, and homelessness are interconnected conditions that can exacerbate and reinforce each other. A physical or mental health condition that results in loss of employment can, in turn, lead to homelessness if an individual exhausts savings. Lack of housing increases an individual's exposure to disease and can worsen preexisting medical conditions. Poor health only makes it more difficult to secure and maintain employment to pay for housing. In short, employment is a significant social determinant of health. Employment-related services may be provided as part of a health center's case management activities. This guide supports integration of employment-related interventions with the already robust primary care and housing services being provided by health care for the homeless projects and related service providers

Possible Synergistic Effects of Thymol and Nicotine Against Crithidia Bombi Parasitism in Bumble Bees

Floral nectar contains secondary compounds with antimicrobial properties that can affect not only plant-pollinator interactions, but also interactions between pollinators and their parasites. Although recent work has shown that consumption of plant secondary compounds can reduce pollinator parasite loads, little is known about the effects of dosage or compound combinations. We used the generalist pollinator Bombus impatiens and its obligate gut parasite Crithidia bombi to study the effects of nectar chemistry on host-parasite interactions. In two experiments we tested (1) whether the secondary compounds thymol and nicotine act synergistically to reduce parasitism, and (2) whether dietary thymol concentration affects parasite resistance. In both experiments, uninfected Bombus impatiens were inoculated with Crithidia and then fed particular diet treatments for 7 days, after which infection levels were assessed. In the synergism experiment, thymol and nicotine alone and in combination did not significantly affect parasite load or host mortality. However, the thymol-nicotine combination treatment reduced log-transformed parasite counts by 30% relative to the control group (P = 0.08). For the experiment in which we manipulated thymol concentration, we found no significant effect of any thymol concentration on Crithidia load, but moderate (2 ppm) thymol concentrations incurred a near-significant increase in mortality (P = 0.054). Our results tentatively suggest the value of a mixed diet for host immunity, yet contrast with research on the antimicrobial activity of dietary thymol and nicotine in vertebrate and other invertebrate systems. We suggest that future research evaluate genetic variation in Crithidia virulence, multi-strain competition, and Crithidia interactions with the gut microbe community that may mediate antimicrobial activities of secondary compounds