When people struggle to make ends meet, public benefit programs have the potential to help them meet their basic needs for food, housing, health care, and cash. Yet many families and individuals do not participate in the programs that could help…

People facing economic instability often need more than one program or service. This might be particularly true for participants in certain programs—for example, families receiving TANF benefits might be more likely to face food insecurity given…

Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education (HMRE) programming is designed to teach participants how to communicate effectively, manage conflict, identify signs of an unhealthy relationship, and other skills important for developing and…

States, counties, and tribes are modernizing their child support programs through holistic, family-centered policies and practices that build partnerships with parents instead of adversarial relationships. They go beyond collecting money to…

Families affected by substance use disorders and involved in the child welfare system face a variety of complex challenges. Children of parents with substance use disorder are more likely to be removed from parental care, less likely to be…

The National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse released a toolkit which presents a compilation of resources that highlight the challenges and key issues associated with launching and sustaining a successful fatherhood program. This toolkit…

This brief explores how guaranteed income might address gaps and deficits in policies designed to address America’s housing affordability crisis. Less well documented in the research are the supplementary and comparative advantages of cash…

This brief examines Latino families’ experiences with North Carolina’s TANF (also known as Work First) and related income assistance programs. The brief summarizes findings from practitioner responses to a survey that included a questionnaire and…

This article describes a community-engaged, mixed-methods research project to identify barriers to TANF among families with young children in Illinois which examined TANF sanctions related to child support enforcement. The study, which used TANF…

Video recordings of the plenary and concurrent breakout sessions are now available for the Virtual Research and Evaluation Conference on Self-Sufficiency (RECS) 2022, convened by the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation in the…