This is an updated brief from the Office of Family Assistance (OFA) 2018 TANF Works! TANF/WIOA Collaboration Series that described collaboration strategies between Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) programs to serve populations with low incomes. These updated briefs were developed through follow-up outreach and interviews to explore how TANF/WIOA collaborations have been sustained over time and have evolved as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Each brief features a success story and includes snapshot infographics depicting TANF and WIOA data.

The Missouri Workforce Centers (WFC) in Kansas City and vicinity and the Greater St. Louis Metropolitan regions provide TANF/WIOA customers with an array of services through Missouri Work Assistance (MWA). The customer flow from TANF to WIOA differs between Kansas City and the Greater St. Louis Metropolitan regions. However, both sites have a similar process where each MWA contractor and its partners assist TANF/WIOA customers at the WFC to support job entry, skills gain, and work experience. The brief highlights key elements that made the collaboration successful, including strengthening community connections, rapidly responding to changes in the labor market, sharing resources, prioritizing team sharing, and implementing a two-generation approach.

Some healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) programs offer economic stability services in addition to relationship skills education. The Office of Family Assistance (OFA) funds community-based programs that offer HMRE and economic stability services as part of their Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood grant programs. This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation brief offers lessons for HMRE program providers seeking to integrate HMRE and economic stability services and examines two social service agencies that received federal grants from OFA —The Parenting Center in Fort Worth, Texas, and Family and Workforce Centers of America in St. Louis, Missouri—to design and implement such integrated programs.

Healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) programs aim to support the well-being of families by teaching them skills to improve communication and conflict management, how to recognize the characteristics of healthy romantic relationships, and how to strengthen existing relationships. HMRE programs may pair a relationship skills curriculum with other services, such as individualized job development or instruction on financial planning, that aim to promote economic stability or content on parenting skills. This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation brief describes typical patterns of participation in three programs that were part of the Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services (STREAMS) evaluation, a large multisite evaluation conducted from 2015 to 2022 to identify strategies for improving the delivery and effectiveness of healthy marriage and relationship education programs. The brief identifies distinct patterns of participation in each of these programs and provides profiles of the clients who participate in these distinct ways.

This report is the second in a series on the implementation and impacts of a novel program that sought to integrate Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education (HMRE) into an employment training program for young adults. To develop and implement the program, Family and Workforce Centers of America, a long-standing provider of employment training in St. Louis, Missouri, enhanced one of its traditional employment training programs to include lessons from a widely implemented relationship education curriculum, along with additional content on workplace relationship skills and personal finances. The integrated program called Career STREAMS (Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services) offered daily workshops for two weeks covering employment-related topics and information on HMRE, weekly booster sessions following the workshops, and individualized case management and job development services. This report documents the study methods, describes program costs and implementation, and presents program impacts after one year.

This Annie E. Casey Foundation brief shares six pivotal strategies for coordinating and funding community efforts to support families at risk of entering the child welfare system: invest in infrastructure at the state and local levels, create funding structures that maximize prevention funds, support community-led planning and design, align programs at the state level to better serve families, invest in evaluation, and leverage private and local dedicated funding streams. Strategies presented in this brief include practices from Colorado, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nebraska, Washington State, and the District of Columbia.

This brief highlights an evaluation of the Healthy Food Alliance for Early Education (HFAEE), a program designed to improve nutrition and health practices in early care and education centers and the homes of children facing food insecurity in St. Louis, Missouri. The brief describes the HFAEE program, its approach, and findings from the program evaluation. Considerations for equitable community work, based on the HFAEE model, are also identified to guide similar community efforts.

This report offers four case studies of rural youth apprenticeships in Maine, Arizona, Missouri, and Mississippi, the challenges for each of the respective regions, and their strategies for success. The report begins with a definition of youth apprenticeships and elaborates on the benefits and obstacles in designing, implementing, and sustaining rural apprenticeships.

Healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) programs aim to support the well-being of families. For such programs to be effective, it is critical that clients attend regularly, yet studies have found that HMRE program providers sometimes struggle to maintain high rates of participation. Identifying and exploring typical participation patterns in HMRE programming can increase understanding of this challenge and point to ways in which programs can promote and support regular participation. This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation brief describes typical patterns of participation in three programs that were part of the Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services (STREAMS) evaluation, a large multisite evaluation conducted from 2015 to 2022 to identify strategies for improving the delivery and effectiveness of healthy marriage and relationship education programs. The brief identifies distinct patterns of participation in each of these programs and provides profiles of the clients who participate in these distinct ways.

This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation digital report shares highlights from the Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services (STREAMS) evaluation, a large multisite evaluation conducted from 2015 to 2022 to identify strategies for improving the delivery and effectiveness of healthy marriage and relationship education programs. This report describes the five grantees —in Georgia, Florida, Denver, Missouri, and Texas— and the services they provided. To capture the perspectives and experiences of the people most directly affected by the programs, this report also tells the personal stories of some of the program staff and participants who contributed to STREAMS.

The Child Welfare Community Collaborations (CWCC) initiative is designed to mobilize communities to develop and evaluate multi-system collaboratives that address local barriers and provide a continuum of services to prevent child abuse and neglect. In 2018 and 2019, the Children’s Bureau awarded 5-year cooperative agreements to a total of 13 states, non-profit organizations, and Native American tribal organizations. This Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation brief provides a high-level description of each of the 13 CWCC projects and is one of a series of products the evaluation team will produce as part of the cross-site process evaluation. This brief contains a one-page description of each project, including its geographic catchment area, population of focus, key partners, prior experience with community-level collaboration, timeline, and local evaluation.