Abstract

Households receiving federal rental subsidies face major impediments to achieving self-sufficiency, including poor work histories, limited education, and significant personal and other challenges. To help address the issues of low-wage work and the concentration of poverty and joblessness in public housing communities, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and MDRC conceived Jobs Plus (originally “Jobs-Plus”) in the mid-1990s. The model encourages economic mobility by providing employment-related services, rent-based work incentives—so that initial earnings increases do not trigger immediate rent increases—and building a community context that supports work.

Program is structured around the three original core components, with some adaptations.

1. Employment-Related Services and Activities. This component calls for employment-related services and activities to help residents secure and retain employment, including job search assistance, education programs, vocational training, and support services such as childcare and transportation assistance. Program services are provided onsite at a job center in the targeted housing development, while other employment-related services are made available through referrals to providers in the community.

2. Rent Incentives. Through this component, Jobs Plus attempts to counter any potential disincentive to work by allowing families to go to work or increase their earnings (or both) without a resulting increase in their rents, which would occur under normal HUD rules (that is, a higher net financial return from work while the program is in effect). For HUD’s Jobs Plus program, the rent incentive, called the Jobs Plus Earned Income Disregard (JPEID), offers a 100-percent disregard of incremental earned income from rent calculations for the duration of the 4-year program and is available to all residents of the Jobs Plus development.

3. Community Support for Work. Inspired by a growing recognition of the importance of social networks and social capital, this component seeks to strengthen social ties and activities among residents to support job preparation and work efforts. Examples of mutual support include everything from sharing information about available jobs to carpooling to work to watching after each other’s children during different job shifts. Another function of the Community Support for Work component is to promote the message that “work pays” and that “employment goals are attainable,” thereby creating an environment where the theme of work is more pervasive than it had been previously.

Therefore skills included in life enrichment themes are not personal characteristics; although individuals who grow in certain skills are typically described in terms of having positive traits, as argued by Peterson and Seligman (2004). Like learning skills, life enrichment skills can be assessed in terms of performance quality.

Stages of Life Enrichment

Life enrichment is a broad concept intended to describe the processes that philosophers describe as problems of life, e.g., Magee (1997), or the search for meaning, e.g., Frankl (2000). How individuals meet challenges in life often opens doors for further development—or closes them.

1. Infants and young children depend on caretakers to provide a sustaining and stimulating environment,

2. Adolescents and young adults engage the world in ways that reflect the unevenness of their explorations of interests that result in identity formation.

3. adults who become parents, and those who provide support services for children, need competencies related to this complex role.

   1. The growth of adults as self-determining individuals includes moving into many roles (e. g., parenting, working, and community involvement) that depend on personal development— and also provide challenges to personal development.

Learning Skills vs Life Enrichment

The principles upon which the life enrichment classification is based include the following similarities and differences from the learning skills.

Similarities:

1. Developmental and language skills are essential for increasing life satisfaction.

2. The Theory of Performance applies to life enrichment skills because using the skills effectively is influenced by the six factors that determine performance quality.

3. Life enrichment skill clusters are analogous to learning skill clusters, i. e., they are related but are considered to be a sample of skills rather than a complete set.

4. Life enrichment skills can be assessed using the same competency rubric used for learning skills.

5. Learning skills are most valuable for educators who tend to work in structured learning environments.

6. Life enrichment skills are valuable for educators in their work to facilitate growth for learners with varied ways of being, developmental challenges, and life problems that reduce achievement.

Differences:

1. Life enrichment themes represent substantive areas of adult development presented in themes—practical life patterns—that include skills integration across the learning domains.

2. Many life enrichment skills, such as being hopeful, represent interim affective processes that are important to mental health and often indicate status outcomes correlated with happiness and satisfaction.

3. Life enrichment skills are processes that can produce much more varied outcomes than are typical of learning skills.

4. Life enrichment skills do not occur in a systematic hierarchy but have patterns of relationship that can support the development of increased complexity of skills overall.

5. Life enrichment skills are valuable for professionals, including educators, who are concerned with facilitating growth in individuals and groups for general life success and for advancement in integrated goal achievements, e.g., for graduate preparation goals.