The Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood grant program authorized $75 million in grants for programs to promote responsible fatherhood through three types of activities: healthy marriage, responsible parenting, and economic stability. As such, this resource from the Administration for Children and Families, Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation offers a systematic review of impact, implementation, and descriptive studies that have examined responsible fatherhood and related family strengthening programs that target low-income fathers.

This brief was prepared by MDRC for the Administration for Children and Families’ Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation. Authors present findings and lessons for policy and practice from a random assignment evaluation on five programs that provided earnings supplements. Focusing on the effects of such programs for single parents, findings show that these types of programs increase employment, income, and employment retention for participating families, but have limited effects on employment advancement.

From Lawrence Mead and Ron Haskins, through the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution, this article analyzes why low-skilled men typically work in lower level positions and provide little support for their children. Authors argue for a program to tie child support with work requirements, which is an initiative that has previously been shown to increase employment. In particular, authors highlight the Noncustodial Parents Choices (NCP Choices) program in Texas as an example to build work enforcement into the child support system.

Work supports such as the Earned Income Tax Credit, child care subsidies, and public health insurance can often help low-income working families reach self-sufficiency. Using the National Center for Children in Poverty’s Family Resource Simulator and Basic Needs Budget Calculator, authors provide an overview of the cost of living in North Dakota, which demonstrates the importance of work supports in helping low-income working families. Authors provide an assessment of how the current work support policies help families and the impact that slight increases in eligibility could have for working families.

This working paper examines the relationship between material hardship and child behavior using the Fragile Families and Child Well-being Study Data. Researchers analyze if economic and financial hardship associates with child socio-emotional behavior, if certain types of hardship are more associated with socio-emotional outcomes, and if there are strong affects for more recent hardship. Results show that children in homes with more material hardship have more aggression and exhibit more withdrawn and anxious behavior.

The Welfare Peer TA Web site has received an APEX award for publication excellence in the area of Web site writing and content. APEX awards are based on excellence in graphic design, editorial content, and the ability to achieve overall communications excellence. For 2011, there were 3,300 entries across a variety of categories, and 957 winners were named across 130 subcategories.

This report was authored through the National Skills Coalition and provides information on Michigan’s No Worker Left Behind Initiative. The Initiative refocused Michigan’s workforce development strategy from quickly placing workers into jobs to a system that focuses on long-term training for workers in areas with a high demand for certain skills. In the three years since the program’s inception, 150,000 Michigan workers have been trained to work in higher-demand industries. Authors offer the keys to success for this program for other states to use as a model for replication.

As part of the Metropolitan Policy Program through the Brookings Institution, this paper analyzes poverty across cities and suburbs as a result of the recession. Since December 2007, 6.6 million people have become unemployed, and the need for assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly, food stamps) has reached a high. The author provides an analysis of unemployment and food stamps as indicators of poverty to understand how poverty across these areas has unevenly increased.

The Department of Health and Human Services launched Home Visiting Evidence of Effectiveness (HomVEE) to conduct a thorough and transparent review of the home visiting research literature and provide an assessment of the evidence of effectiveness for home visiting program models that target families with pregnant women and children from birth to age 5.

This resource is from the Community Capacity Development Office (CCDO) of the Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to understand the needs of Indian Country Weed and Seed communities. Weed and Seed is a community-based, multiagency strategy involving law enforcement, crime prevention, and community revitalization, which is aimed to prevent, control, and reduce violent crime, drug abuse, and gang activity in high-crime neighborhoods. This report is designed to assist Tribal justice practitioners, administrators, and policymakers in designing and developing reentry strategies for offenders returning to their Tribal communities.