This Best Practices Guide (BPG) is a "how-to" guide for employment and training agencies on tailoring their service delivery systems to be more effective in training, placing, and retaining homeless individuals in gainful employment. While this guide is written from the perspective of an employment and training agency (e.g., a Private Industry Council (PIC) operating under the Job Training Partnership Act), much of the material presented is likely to be of interest to the wide variety of public and private organizations providing services to homeless families and individuals.

Among the major objectives of this guide are the following:

to enhance agencies' knowledge of homeless individuals;

to provide guidance on the types of homeless persons that are most (and least) likely to benefit from employment and training services;

to identify the full range of services likely to be needed by homeless individuals to be successful in completing training and securing and retaining employment, and how these services can be provided directly by employment and training agencies or arranged through linkages with public or private service providers;

to identify the specific planning and implementation steps needed by employment and training agencies to establish an effective service delivery system for recruiting and serving homeless individuals; and

to provide examples of successful strategies used by employment and training agencies, and homeless-serving agencies, in assisting homeless individuals to (re)enter the workforce.

Much of the material presented in this Best Practices Guide is based on the experiences of 63 organizations from across the United States who provided comprehensive services for homeless individuals and families under the Job Training for the Homeless Demonstration Program (JTHDP).' JTHDP, authorized under Section 73 1 of the Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act of 1987, was intended to "provide information and direction for the future of job training for homeless Americans."' Under this legislation, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) was authorized to plan, implement, and test the effectiveness of a comprehensive range of employment, training, and other support services to assist homeless individuals to find and retain employment.