For decades, most states have made a practice of giving citizens returning from prison or jail a small amount of money, called "gate money," to cover the cost of transportation and other immediate needs. Many legislatures have considered increasing the dollar amount of their cash assistance and offering this kind of support more widely.…

Cash transfer based social protection can potentially contribute positively upon targeted beneficiaries on a variety of developmental aspects. This study explored the pilot and scaled-up phases of the Harmonised Social Cash Transfer program to determine impacts towards improving under-eight children's access to food, education, and health…

A quality improvement system (QIS) is an intentional effort to raise the quality of afterschool programming in an ongoing, organized fashion. There are a number of reasons the QIS is gaining popularity. The main reasons community leaders are drawn to improving quality is that they know that 1) higher quality programs will mean better experiences…

The Training Centre Infrastructure Fund (TCIF) was initially announced in Budget 2004 and represented an immediate measure of the broader Workplace Skills Strategy. TCIF was a three-year $25 million pilot project, designed to address the growing need for union-employer training centres to replace aging equipment and simulators that were not up to…

Lumina Foundation for Education created the Dreamkeepers and Angel Fund Emergency Financial Aid Programs to assist community college students who are at risk of dropping out because of unexpected financial crises. Both programs are multiyear pilot projects that began in 2005 and are administered by Scholarship America and the American Indian…

This is the fourth report of a process evaluation of Palm Beach County Prime Time, Inc., an intermediary organization dedicated to improving the quality of afterschool programs, by Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago. It covers the 2007-2008 program year, which was the inaugural year of Prime Time's formal Quality Improvement System (QIS)…

In March 1995, the Mississippi State Department of Education implemented the Home Ties program as a 5-year pilot program at five sites, using federal funds made available through a sub-grant from the Mississippi Department of Human Services (MDHS) and matching funds appropriated by the Mississippi legislature. The program provided intensive,…

The necessity of having funds which meet client related and additional educational needs are presented in this two-part monograph. The first part is comprised of a comprehensive discussion of Training Related Expenses and analysis of their uses and effects on client completion or termination from training. The second part describes the function…

The effectiveness of the "user choice" approach to allocating public funds for training was examined through telephone interviews with 46 employers who were associated with 48 of Australia's 50 User Choice pilot projects (including employers associated with 7 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander initiatives). The employers uniformly…

A study was conducted to evaluate the Boston Public Schools Career Exploration Project. The project model contained assumptions regarding need for a significant amount of funding, a teacher training program, phased implementation with a concentration of effort in pilot schools, substantial amounts of materials, creation of positions of leadership,…

This evaluation of the pilot phase of "Skills for Work" courses demonstrates many strengths. The report includes many examples of innovative good practice, which HMIE will disseminate and promote through events and a range of media. It is particularly encouraging that almost all learners had a very positive experience and gained…

Australia introduced User Choice nationally in January 1998 to develop a national training system that is more responsive to clients' needs. User Choice is based on nine principles, including the following: (1) clients can negotiate their publicly funded training needs; (2) User Choice operates in a national training market not limited by state or…