Career and Job Placement
Family Expectations staff continue to identify past child support issues, as well as employment and finance challenges, as barriers to achieving long-term couple and family goals. Continuing to develop an integrated program model that brings together marriage and relationship skills training, employment training and placement services, child support education and solutions, and budget and finance training, is critical for some couples to advance their family stability and financial independence.
Employment Services
The goal of Family Expectations’ employment services is to help couples make decisions together to gain family stability. Each couple will work with their Family Support Coordinator to develop a “family goal plan.” In fact, in some couples, both partners may access employment services to their shared benefit. One study explored the practice of co-enrollment and found that mothers involved in the same work support program as their male partners demonstrated stronger short-term gains in employment and earnings than did mothers who participated alone.
One unique component FE is working to implement is a partnership with Hobby Lobby, a national company based in Oklahoma City with the largest warehouse in the state. The firm offers a very competitive minimum wage at $12 per hour which would allow FE to prepare workers for jobs with pay comparable to work subsidy programs.