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About the Employment Retention and Advancement Project
The federal welfare overhaul of 1996 ushered in myriad policy changes aimed at getting low-income parents off public assistance and into employment. These changes — especially cash welfare’s transformation from an entitlement into a time-limited benefit contingent on work participation — have intensified the need to help low-income families become economically self-sufficient and remain so in the long term. Although a fair amount is known about how to help welfare recipients prepare for and find jobs in the first place, the Employment Retention and Advancement (ERA) project is the most comprehensive effort thus far to discover which approaches help welfare recipients and other low-income people stay steadily employed and advance in their jobs.
Launched in 1999 and slated to end in 2009, the ERA project encompasses more than a dozen demonstration programs and uses a rigorous research design to analyze the programs’ implementation and impacts on research sample members, who were randomly assigned to the study groups. With technical assistance from MDRC and The Lewin Group, the study was conceived and funded by the Administration for Children and Families in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; supplemental support comes from the U.S. Department of Labor. Most of the ERA programs were designed specifically for the purposes of evaluation, in some cases building on prior initiatives. Because the programs’ aims and target populations vary, so do their services:
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Advancement programs focus on helping low-income workers move into better jobs by offering such services as career counseling and education and training.
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Placement and retention programs aim to help participants find and hold jobs and are aimed mostly at “hard-to-employ” people, such as welfare recipients who have disabilities or substance abuse problems.
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Mixed-goals programs focus on job placement, retention, and advancement, in that order, and are targeted primarily to welfare recipients who are searching for jobs.
The ERA project’s evaluation component investigates the following aspects of each program:
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Implementation. What services does the program provide? How are those services delivered? Who receives them? How are problems addressed?
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Impacts. To what extent does the program improve employment rates, job retention, advancement, and other key outcomes? Looking across programs, which approaches are most effective, and for whom?
A total of 15 ERA experiments are being implemented in eight states: California, Illinois, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Oregon, South Carolina, and Texas.
The evaluation draws on administrative and fiscal records, surveys of participants, and field visits to the sites.
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