Integrating Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education into an Employment Training Program: The Impacts of Career STREAMS

This report is the second in a series on the implementation and impacts of a novel program that sought to integrate HMRE into an employment training program for young adults. To develop and implement the program, Family and Workforce Centers of America (FWCA), a long-standing provider of employment training in St. Louis, Missouri, enhanced one of its traditional employment training programs to include lessons from a widely implemented relationship education curriculum, along with additional content on workplace relationship skills and personal finances. The integrated program—called Career STREAMS—offered (1) daily workshops for two weeks covering employment-related topics and information on HMRE; (2) five, one-hour booster sessions offered weekly following the two-week workshop; and (3) individualized case management and job development services.

This report documents the study methods, describes program costs and implementation, and presents program impacts after one year. The impacts were estimated by comparing the outcomes of participants who were randomly assigned to either a group that was offered Career STREAMS or a control group that was offered FWCA’s traditional employment training program.