In Austin/Travis County, there is a substantial gap between the need for and supply of nontraditional-hour child care, with only about 2,000 regulated child care slots (or about 4 percent of existing regulated supply) that are licensed to provide child care during nontraditional hours -- before 7:00 a.m. and after 6:00 p.m. during the traditional workweek and anytime on weekends. This report presents findings from interviews, focus groups, and analyses of survey and administrative data to describe nontraditional-hour child care demand, supply, and preferences. Two of the report’s findings are: 1) the potential demand for nontraditional-hour child care is higher among groups facing structural barriers to opportunities and 2) an inadequate supply of nontraditional-hour child care has decreased families’ financial well-being and businesses’ ability to access talented employees.

The U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration is soliciting applications for the agency’s Workforce Pathways for Youth grant program. This grant program, operated by national out-of-school time (OST) organizations, will expand workforce development activities in OST organizations across the country that serve youth living in rural areas during non-school hours. The goals of the grant program are to:

1) expand age-appropriate workforce readiness programming through national OST organizations and their state or locally-operated affiliate organizations and ultimately scale up these efforts;
2) promote increased alignment between OST organizations, workforce development programs, and school systems; and
3) coordinate across workforce development, schools, and OST in order to provide work-based learning experiences, occupational skills training, and unsubsidized employment placements to increase opportunities for youth, particularly those at risk of not completing their high school education, to gain the skills needed to be successful in post-secondary education and employment.

Closing date for application submissions is May 19, 2023.

Being mentored helps young people, particularly young people at risk, stay healthy and safe. Yet the COVID-19 pandemic challenged traditional strategies for engaging youth and prompted mentoring models to evolve. This report explores how both mentoring programs and mentors adapted to social distancing guidelines during the pandemic. It addresses research questions related to the social-emotional effects of social isolation and virtual learning and explores the benefits and challenges of using virtual mentoring models. The report also offers recommendations aimed at helping mentoring programs better serve youth from a distance.

The 2021 expansion of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) led to a historic reduction in poverty in the United States, particularly for children. This essay discusses where in the country the expanded CTC reduced child poverty the most. It also examines how the reduction in child poverty varies across two characteristics: state-level cost of living and state-level poverty. The essay notes that there is evidence that the policy has reduced child poverty at both the family and regional levels.

TANF cash assistance and child support programs, with their restrictive policy environments and historically compliance-focused cultures, have opportunities for growth in how they engage families during continuous quality improvement efforts. To understand how TANF, child support, and other human services programs gather and use family input for program improvement, the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation has funded the TANF and Child Support Moving Forward: Further Incorporating Family Input Study. The study team collected and developed resources for a variety of audiences in TANF and child support programs, including program staff, program administrators, and families whom TANF and child support programs have served, currently serve, and aim to serve. This expansive toolkit provides guidance, real world examples, and resources to help TANF and child support programs engage the families they serve in improving service delivery, policy, and program operations.

Goal4 It!™ is a participant-centered framework for working with TANF participants to set goals, break their goals down into manageable steps, develop specific plans to achieve the steps, and regularly review their goal progress. This report summarizes the design and implementation of Goal4 It!™ at the Jefferson County, Colorado, Department of Human Services. The agency implemented Goal4 It!™ as an alternative to the traditional case management provided by Colorado Works, its TANF program. 

The White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy and the Domestic Policy Council spearheaded the Recovery-Ready Workplace (RRW) Resource Hub, an online resource hosted by the Employment and Training Administration (ETA), in collaboration with various government agencies including the U.S. Department of Labor. The RRW Resource Hub provides guidance, tools, best practices, and other resources to help public and private sector employers address substance use disorder in the workforce, hire people in or seeking recovery, and support recovery in the workplace. The ETA will host a webinar on March 30, 2023 from 1:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. ET on the Hub and Administration policy priorities on substance use disorders and recovery in the workplace.

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 other circumstances in their lives. Even when participating in a single program, a small earnings increase can cause a loss of benefits. Also, some working parents view fragmented program rules as difficult to navigate with programs not designed to support upward economic mobility. These as well as other barriers challenge agencies to streamline coordination among programs. This analysis by the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, using pre-COVID pandemic data, looks at the reach of the social safety net, including the interaction of specific programs, to better understand program participation as the economy continues to recover.

Recognizing fathers’ importance to their families, as well as the difficulties that many fathers with low incomes face supporting their children, the federal government has supported responsible fatherhood (RF) programs for more than a decade. Many questions, however, remain about how to best serve fathers and their families. To identify current gaps in the knowledge base for Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood programming, the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) undertook the Fatherhood, Relationships, and Marriage — Illuminating the Next Generation of Research (FRAMING Research) project. The project convened a series of technical work groups to discuss issues related to research on RF programs. This brief describes the third work group session’s meeting discussion, which focused on fostering trust among fathers who participate in RF programs and recruiting and retaining young fathers in services.

Experiments conducted in the mid-1990s show that a combination of work requirements and work supports substantially increased the employment of cash assistance recipients in Aid to Families with Dependent Children, while having little effect on recipients’ average income. There is little evidence on the effects of TANF’s work requirements, though, and recent research on other means-tested programs demonstrates that their work requirements have had little effect on employment and have substantially reduced the number of people receiving the benefits they provide. Using administrative data, this Congressional Budget Office working paper examines how Alabama’s recent expansion of its TANF work requirement to the parents of children between the ages of 6 months and 11 months affects their employment and income.