March 2016 Jobs Plus FY15 Grantee Convening, Washington, DC

On March 22-24, 2016, representatives from 18 Jobs Plus Pilot Grants convened at HUD Headquarters. Newly-awarded and former grantees, along with their local Department of Labor Workforce Investment Board partners and resident leaders discussed the three pillars of Jobs Plus – Community Support for Work, Financial Incentives and Employment Related Services and engaged in robust discussion on first-year experiences of the program, the importance of forming partnerships and collaborations with their local and Federal partners, and partner engagement. Mayor Setti Warren, Mayor of Newton, MA and Chair of the Community Development and Housing Committee advisory board for the United States Conference of Mayors, provided the opening remarks. View the March 2016 Convening Agenda.

Overview

The purpose of the Jobs Plus Initiative program is to develop locally-based, job-driven approaches to increase earnings and advance employment outcomes through work readiness, employer linkages, job placement, educational advancement technology skills, and financial literacy for residents of public housing. The place-based Jobs Plus Initiative program addresses poverty among public housing residents by incentivizing and enabling employment through income disregards for working families, and a set of services designed to support work including employer linkages, job placement and counseling, educational advancement, and financial counseling. Ideally, these incentives will saturate the target developments, building a culture of work and making working families the norm.

The Jobs Plus Initiative program consists of the following three core components:

1. Employment-related service: Grantees offer employment-related services to residents with a range of employment needs.  This includes services such as work-readiness training, employer linkages, financial counseling, educational advancement, job placement, and employment counseling.
    
2. Financial incentives:Targeted residents enrolled in Jobs Plus will be granted a 100 percent income disregard that will remain in place for up to 48 months.
    
3. Community support for work:Grantees market Jobs Plus services and financial incentives to alltargeted residents in a development.  The goal is to saturate communities with work-related messages and to create a culture of work.

Jobs Plus services are tailored to residents’ individual needs and are drawn from a menu of on-site and referral services.  For unemployed residents, case managers will help identify short and long-term employment goals and create plans to accomplish them.  Employed individuals can work with case managers to take the necessary steps to advance in the labor market.

Background: Jobs-Plus was conceived in the mid-1990s by the HUD, the Rockefeller Foundation, and MDRC, and put into practice from 1998 to 2003. The program targeted all working-age residents, attempting to “saturate” the housing developments with information, services, and incentives to support work. MDRC carefully tested Jobs-Plus in six cities and found that where the components were fully implemented, the program produced sustained positive effects on residents’ earnings. A 16 percent increase in average annual earnings was sustained up to three years after the program ended.

Current Status:

Since 2015, HUD has awarded nearly $63 million to 24 public housing agencies (PHA) to implement the Jobs Plus Program.

Resources

• MDRC has consolidated their Jobs Plus publications on this webpage.
  • Drawing on lessons from the original demonstration and existing Jobs-Plus replication sites, MDRC will share operational lessons for public housing agencies responding to HUD's NOFA for the Jobs-Plus Pilot (This webcast is not sponsored by HUD.) This November 3, 2014 webcast will be archived and available for download on HUD's Webcast Archive.