Changes in the Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 began providing Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Employment and Training (SNAP E&T) programs with the opportunity to use SNAP E&T funds to subsidize wages and to provide work-based learning activities as work experience. With these changes, SNAP E&T programs could offer a range of activities that they previously did not, but had been commonly available through other programs and on which extensive research already existed. To ensure that SNAP E&T programs considering work-based approaches benefited from the previous body of knowledge, the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) funded MEF Associates and its subcontractor, Mathematica, to conduct a review of the research literature on the effectiveness of work-based strategies. The study’s objective was to provide information on which wage subsidy and work-based learning models worked in improving employment outcomes, how government programs developed strong connections with employers for the purpose of implementing such models, and the implications of findings from past research that implemented effective strategies within SNAP E&T.
