A University of Louisville, Center for Family and Community Wellbeing study found that the Mind Matters: Overcoming Adversity and Increasing Resilience digital program (fee required) significantly reduced post-traumatic stress symptoms and increased trauma coping skills. The Dibble Institute will host a webinar on July 13, 2022 from 4:00 p.m. ET to 5:00 p.m. ET where Mind Matters author Carolyn Curtis will review the research behind Mind Matters’ effectiveness. She discusses the program’s theory of change as well as the individual lessons that bring results.

Participants will be able to:

• Understand what the University of Louisville study results say about the effectiveness of Mind Matters
• Explain the theories used in Mind Matters
• Describe the research behind the Mind Matters Pinwheel Curls

This brief provides guidance on the process of recruiting, hiring, training, and supervising parent partners who have closed child welfare cases and serve as mentors to parents currently involved in the child welfare system. While parent partner programs may vary regarding the support they offer, their relationship with the child welfare agency and court system, and how they are structured, a common element includes parent partners providing guidance and education about the child welfare system. Being able to identify, prepare, and support people who serve as parent partners is critical to the success of any parent partner program.

This article outlines lessons learned from a study that looked at workforce development programs serving 16 to 24-year-olds that were convicted, adjudicated of, or charged with serious crimes in the juvenile or criminal justice system. Insights include the importance of strategic job placement to help youth explore their career interests while working toward stable and lasting employment, building partnerships with employers who are willing to hire young people with system involvement and subsidizing employment for employers who are hesitant to do so, and recognizing that young people are entrepreneurial and want to explore opportunities in fields like information technology and business.

This Child Welfare Information Gateway podcast discusses the National Training and Development Curriculum (NTDC) for Foster and Adoptive Parents, an organization developed to provide free curriculum and resources for potential foster or adoptive parents to give them the information and tools they need to parent a child that has experienced trauma, separation, or loss. Podcast topics include common technical and implementation challenges and knowledge gaps that current training presents to child welfare agencies and trainers; how NTDC for Foster and Adoptive Parents offers trainers and facilitators flexibility to meet both their jurisdictions and parents’ needs; key messages woven throughout the curriculum’s themes to help parents understand trauma, culture, and how to best respond to conflict; and takeaways participants have shared with their facilitators.

This blog entry discusses the potential impact of new state legislation in South Carolina that seeks to tap into federal funding to help cover the costs of its extended foster care programming, which serves young adults between the ages of 18 and 21. The federal funding is expected to be allocated towards employing more caseworkers and tailoring support to meet the needs of more young people across the state.

Both the early childhood and child welfare systems are investing in promising new ways to support families with young children, particularly as they strive to recover from COVID-19 challenges and to become more equitable. These investments are creating new opportunities for child welfare and early childhood systems to align services and collaborate across both systems to better support children. This brief provides a rationale for better coordination between the two systems, followed by recommendations for alignment and examples of strong alignment in the field. Recommendations are structured around three main areas of opportunity for coordination: preventing child abuse and neglect, supporting children and families with open child welfare cases, and creating stronger functionality and supports in both systems.

The statutory language authorizing HPOG provides that funded grants should be “designed to provide eligible individuals with the opportunity to obtain education and training for occupations in the health care field that pay well and are expected to either experience labor shortages or be in high demand.” This report provides empirical analysis focusing on the first of these HPOG goals: training for healthcare jobs that “pay well.” It explores the prevalence of two possible training patterns that might lead to such jobs: direct entry into training for occupations requiring more/longer preparation (referred to as “Above-Entry-Level Training”), or a sequence of trainings, in a scheme consistent with the career pathways framework (referred to as “Follow-On Training”). Both rounds of HPOG (HPOG 1.0 and HPOG 2.0) emphasized utilizing a career pathways framework.

A healthy relationship can play a critical role in establishing family stability for both adults and children. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has taken a toll on families nationwide with reports of higher rates of stress and declining marriages. Understanding the importance of healthy relationships in promoting economic stability among TANF recipients, the Office of Family Assistance (OFA) awards Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education (HMRE) grants for a variety of programs working to integrate skills-based relationship education into employment services. During this June 28, 2022 OFA webinar, HMRE grantees and subject matter experts discussed the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on marriage and relationships. Webinar participants learned numerous ways HMRE grantees are engaging clients in programming such as family stability, healthy relationships, and economic security; explored how HMRE grantees adjusted during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how their clients benefited from the pandemic adaptations; and heard about how these grantees will utilize lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic to improve future efforts.

Webinar speakers included: Nikkole Abbas, Director of Family Support and Advocacy Services, Youth and Family Services of South Dakota; Robert Ketchum, Data Manager/Adult Educator, Youth and Family Services of South Dakota; and Mariana Falconier, Associate Professor of Family Science in the School of Public Health and Project Director of the University of Maryland’s TOGETHER program. The webinar was moderated by Robyn Cenizal, Project Director, Family Strengthening, ICF.

This brief shares lessons from four employment coaching programs that made major changes to their operations during the COVID-19 pandemic. The discussion provides employment programs information about modifying service delivery and meeting client needs. The lessons learned from the programs in this study may help other programs provide coaching during a public health crisis or other type of emergency.

This report details the rate of youth unemployment by racial demographic during the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The study described in the report includes unemployment trends by age group and racial make-up using both state and national level data. Among its findings was that while unemployment decreased during the second year of the pandemic as businesses reopened and the American Rescue Plan was implemented, Black youth continued to have the highest unemployment followed by Latinos and, further, that recoveries in the labor market did not lessen racial and ethnic disparities.