Supporting healthy development begins in early childhood. To support their children and optimize family well-being, parents need access to high-quality early care and education (ECE) services, as well as support for broader family needs, such as nutrition, home visiting, parenting skills, or employment. ACF sponsored the Assessing Models of Coordinated Services (AMCS) study to deepen understanding of programs, groups, agencies, or organizations that coordinate ECE with other health and human services (referred to in this report as coordinated services approaches). This report describes the study’s qualitative data collection, presents models of coordinated services at the state and local level, and reports findings about state and local coordinated services approaches.

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the way many human services agencies operated. The stress, trauma, and grief caused by the pandemic prompted agencies to rethink how they engaged with and supported their clients. It also forced agencies to experiment with new approaches to address persistent stress and trauma experienced by their own staff. This Mathematica podcast brings together research experts and leaders of human services programs to discuss trends that have emerged in human services agencies during the pandemic.

Student loan forgiveness is one way to recognize the important work of the human services workforce and to motivate individuals to join or remain in public service professions. Employees of a federal, state, or local tribal government agency or a non-profit are eligible for federal loan forgiveness after making 120 payments. The 15-year-old U.S. Department of Education’s Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program (PSLF) has been overhauled to expand eligibility and make it easier to navigate. This important fix allows more federal student loan borrowers to easily access PSLF and obtain the relief the program promised. These changes are time limited. Some borrowers will need to consolidate their federal loans and/or submit a PSLF form by October 31, 2022 to take advantage of this opportunity.

ACF has created the PSLF landing page that includes resources with information on eligibility and tools for getting the word out. The page includes a recording of the March 31 webinar hosted by the Office of Early Childhood Development in partnership with the Department of Education, attended by over 17,000 early educators. This recording, as well as PDFs and Frequently Asked Questions, are also housed on the site. 

Many fatherhood programs aim to or are required to include programming that supports healthy coparenting and romantic relationships through skill building and other services. However, despite the importance of supporting these healthy relationships, it can be difficult to do so in practice. This brief identifies three barriers fatherhood programs often face when addressing healthy relationships with fathers: engaging fathers in romantic relationship content, determining and implementing approaches for coparent engagement in relationship education, and providing support for fathers navigating legal systems and agencies that can affect their coparenting relationships. It also provides three resources that offer strategies fatherhood programs can use to address these barriers and better support fathers’ healthy relationships.

The National Association of Workforce Development Professionals will host a webinar on September 15, 2022 from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. CT which will cover how workforce professionals have the opportunity at every customer touch point to make an impact, even through the smallest interactions.

This webinar focuses on making excellence the standard, not the exception, and identifies strategies and tactics to help professionals become more excellent. The webinar will discuss ways to increase excellence in customer interactions, in workspaces, in emotional intelligence, in connections with partners, and in programs. Learning objectives include:

• Defining and understanding what excellence is, and what excellence is not.
• Distinguishing average and excellent, and learning strategies to pursue excellence in every customer interaction.
• Role playing, using specific situations that front line staff face, and taking that situation and implementing strategies to ensure staff are operating in excellence, even in difficult situations.

A registration fee for attendance is required.

Since the establishment of the Child Support Enforcement Program in 1975, child support policy has played a central role in improving the economic circumstances of children living apart from one of their parents. Prior research has documented the policy’s positive effects on family economic wellbeing at the time of receipt. But little work has examined the effects of child support receipt as a child on economic outcomes in adulthood. This report uses analytic approaches to test whether adults who received support as children have higher earnings, are more likely to be employed, have lower public program participation, receive less in public benefits, and are less likely to have an open child support case than those who did not receive child support or received very little.

This article discusses how partners within the County of San Diego formed two programs, Developmental Screening & Enhancement Program (DSEP) and KidSTART, aimed at ensuring that children in foster care 5 years old or younger receive needed services to maintain placement stability, achieve timely permanency, and reach their full potential. Both programs operate under Rady Children’s Hospital San Diego. DSEP provides developmental and behavior screening and service linkages for all young children involved with the County of San Diego’s Child Welfare Services (CWS), while KidSTART provides comprehensive services to young children with complex needs, regardless of system involvement.

This blog offers an array of sources for understanding special population characteristics and demographics in the labor force, and for using labor market information to help target services and design service delivery to special populations. These populations could include (but are not limited to) veterans, older workers, long term employed, or disabled individuals. Included are key workforce data sources for planning and designing services to special populations, data sources for program staff to use in service delivery, and tools and training to access and utilize data sources effectively.

Mentoring is integral to apprenticeship programs and plays a critical role in the success and retention of young apprentices. Mentors can help apprentices navigate the workplace, develop a combination of essential and technical skills, and deepen their engagement. In turn, mentors find value in developing leadership and management skills and sharing organizational insights. This fact sheet highlights the importance of mentoring in youth apprenticeship programs. It illustrates mentor roles and the ways mentors teach and advise. Also, the fact sheet provides some reflective questions mentors can ask as well as real-life challenging examples that mentors can use.

The Strengthening the Implementation of Responsible Fatherhood Programs (SIRF) project uses rapid learning cycles in an effort to improve the enrollment, engagement, and retention of fathers in nine current federal Fatherhood Family-focused, Interconnected, Resilient, and Essential (FIRE) grantees and one former recipient of a federal fatherhood grant. This brief illustrates how SIRF and program teams used a human-centered design technique called customer journey mapping, a collaborative process that puts the needs and goals of participants at the center of efforts to design or improve a product or service. Mapping helped both the program and SIRF teams to better understand fathers’ program experiences and perspectives, and to identify where program processes might be restructured to increase fathers’ participation.