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The study, conducted in conjunction with Abt Associates, the prime contractor, estimated impacts on program participants and examined the implementation experiences of four sites that offered unemployed and other disadvantaged individuals training and support services that were funded through American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 grants. The four sites were: (1) the American Indian Opportunities Industrialization Center in Minnesota, (2) North Central Texas College, (3) Grand Rapids Community College in Michigan, and (4) the Kern Community College District in California. The first two focused on training in the health care fields, while the latter two focused on training for green jobs.

Key Findings: (1) All grantees' programs featured a series of training courses that could be taken in sequence to foster career development. However, most participants attended training for short periods of time, ranging from 2.4 months to 3.3 months on average, with few participants attending longer than 6 months; (2) The programs had positive impacts on participation in education and training activities, particularly vocational training; receipt of training-related support services, particularly financial assistance, career counseling, and job placement assistance; and receipt of vocational credentials; (3) One of the four programs, administered by the Kern Community College District, had a positive and statistically significant impact on participants' earnings in the fifth and sixth calendar quarters after random assignment, while the other three sites did not; (4) There was no evidence of statistically significant impacts at any site on other measures of financial and economic stability, such as household income and public benefit receipt.

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The Workforce Innovation Fund (WIF) was an initiative to develop and test new services and strategies in the public workforce system. Administered by the US Department of Labor's (DOL) Employment and Training Administration (ETA), using $258 million in Congressional appropriations over multiple years, the WIF initiative supported a wide range of interventions in 43 grants. The grants were competitively awarded in three rounds (26 grants in Round 1 awarded in 2012, 11 grants in Round 2 awarded in 2014, and six grants in Round 3 awarded in 2015). The projects had varied periods of performance (of between three and five years), with the final group of grants ending on September 30, 2019. In addition to promoting innovation, WIF also sought to build on and expand use of evaluation research in the workforce system. Using a 'tiered-evidence' model, the initiative required that all prospective grantees demonstrate how their proposed innovation was supported by past research and how it would be evaluated to generate future evidence.

To support both grantees and evaluators, ETA provided technical assistance through a WIF-funded National Evaluation Coordinator (NEC). Abt Associates was selected as the NEC, a role which also encompassed providing assistance to ETA on evaluation criteria, reviewing proposed WIF evaluation designs, providing technical guidance to evaluators, and producing a report to document what was learned from the 43 evaluations of the WIF projects. This report then provides summary information on the WIF interventions and their evaluations as well as and successes and challenges in conducting the evaluations. The primary source for this report is the evaluation reports, produced between 2015 and 2019 by the third-party evaluators engaged by the WIF grantees. Finally, this report highlights lessons learned from the WIF experience and considers how these lessons might be applied in future grantee-funded evaluations.

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