The Office of Family Assistance partnered with the Children’s Bureau to develop the Families Are Stronger Together Learning Community (FAST-LC), which focused on preventing family involvement in the child welfare system through developing, implementing, and enhancing Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF)–Child Welfare (CW) partnerships and innovations. FAST-LC was a one-year initiative that involved 10 Tribal and state TANF and CW agencies. 

This tip sheet accompanies a video on Strengthening Connections: Leveraging Existing Networks for Integrated Prevention Services, which highlights lessons from the FAST-LC. These resources feature representatives from the Chippewa Cree Indians of the Rocky Boy’s Reservation, the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, and the California Tribal TANF Partnership, who discuss how they cultivated partnerships with agencies to plan and implement integrated prevention services.

The Office of Family Assistance partnered with the Children’s Bureau to develop the Families Are Stronger Together Learning Community (FAST-LC), which focused on preventing family involvement in the child welfare system through developing, implementing, and enhancing Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF)–Child Welfare (CW) partnerships and innovations. FAST-LC was a one-year initiative that involved 10 Tribal and state TANF and CW agencies. 

This video accompanies a reflection guide and tip sheet, Strengthening Connections: Leveraging Existing Networks for Integrated Prevention Services, which highlights lessons from the FAST-LC. The video features representatives from the Chippewa Cree Indians of the Rocky Boy’s Reservation, the Pascua Yaqui Tribe, and the California Tribal TANF Partnership, who discuss how they cultivated partnerships with agencies to plan and implement integrated prevention services.

In recognition of Youth Apprenticeship Week in 2024, Mathematica spoke with Maryland’s Director of Apprenticeship and Training and California’s deputy chief of the Division of Apprenticeship Standards. This recording was supported by the Registered Apprenticeship Technical Assistance Center of Excellence and highlights in-school and out-of-school youth apprenticeship initiatives for youth ages 16–24.

Families that receive Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) cash assistance are often in a state of crisis. They face immediate material needs, and these unmet basic needs put families at an increased risk for investigations in the child welfare system. Addressing unmet material needs among TANF participants, through providing concrete supports, can help prevent child maltreatment and ultimately keep children in their homes.

This tipsheet is intended for state, county, and Tribal TANF leaders who make program-level decisions about the types of resources and services that their programs offer to TANF participants.

This Jobs for the Future guide provides actionable tips and resources to initiate discussion and potential partnership with your local workforce development board. It was developed within the context of California’s public workforce system.

The FAST-LC Initial Convening was hosted on October 18-19, 2023 in Bethesda, Maryland. The session “Overview of the LI2 Framework with a Focus on the Learn Phase” included a 20-minute plenary presentation on the Learn, Innovate, Improve (LI2) framework and its roots in implementation science. The presenter also highlighted practical ways for the FAST-LC sites to get started with Learn phase activities.

The FAST-LC Initial Convening was hosted on October 18-19, 2023 in Bethesda, Maryland. This session was presented by Clare Anderson at Chapin Hall, who discussed the history of child welfare and its impact on the economic stability of families who are involved with the child welfare system.

FAST-LC held a virtual event in January 2024 that aimed to provide a better understanding of how TANF dollars are used in Child Welfare and operational considerations for aligning funding with prevention efforts. This session reinforced the ways in which TANF spending in Child Welfare is consistent with the statutory purposes of TANF (particularly the first purpose), to inform FAST-LC participating sites’ action plans, and to learn from peers about how they are utilizing TANF funds for prevention strategies upstream of and within child welfare.

FAST-LC held a virtual event in February 2024, “Road Maps and Road Tests: Strategies to Strengthen Your FAST-LC Initiatives.” The FAST-LC site teams were in the process of designing and implementing new strategies to advance their FAST-LC initiative goals. Drawing on the Learn, Innovate, Improve (LI2) framework introduced at the October Initial Convening, this session introduced site teams to two key strategies to support the design and pilot testing of new strategies. The session also featured a practitioner alum from the Leveraging America’s Social and Economic Resilience TANF Learning Community, who shared about their site’s experience with road mapping and road testing.

FAST-LC held a virtual event in April 2024, “Sharing Is Caring: Challenges and Solutions to Integrating TANF and Child Welfare Data for Prevention.” FAST-LC site teams were at varying stages of integration when it came to the working relationships and processes between TANF and Child Welfare program teams. Some teams are housed within the same agency or division whereas others are organized under separate departments. The organizational structure had some bearing on the extent to which data sharing exists between TANF and Child Welfare as well as the possibilities for further interagency sharing of such data. Yet, most FAST-LC teams have identified the topic of data sharing and integration as an area of focus and need for support. This event was designed to (1) offer guidance and tips in response to top-of-mind issues and questions related to TANF-Child Welfare data sharing and (2) share two novel case studies from the field.