Case management is an important and required element of SNAP E&T programs. This session from the SNAP E&T 2022 National Forum shared findings from the Food and Nutrition Service’s Survey of SNAP E&T Case Management study, which included a national survey of SNAP agencies and four case studies to learn about case management implementation and best practices. In the presentation from the session, representatives from Arkansas’ Division of Workforce Services, Adult Education Section and Oregon’s Department of Human Services shared how they provide case management to SNAP E&T participants and discussed their best practices and lessons learned.

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act passed in 1996 replaced the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. TANF imposed work requirements on participants who received benefits for a certain period of time and time limits on benefits that were paid with federal funds. Some evaluations conducted at that time, including the National Evaluation of Welfare-to-Work Strategies (NEWWS), found these new approaches led to some positive short-term effects for participants. This report is part of the From Theory to Practice project and presents findings from an analysis of 20-year outcomes and impacts of an employment-focused program offered to welfare recipients in Portland, Oregon in the 1990s as part of NEWWS. The findings described in the report represent some of the first available evidence on how individuals who previously received welfare fared in the labor market over the long term and on how sequence and cluster analyses can provide a richer picture of their trajectories and program impacts.

The National Governors Association launched the Strengthening Substance Use Disorder (SUD) Systems of Care (SUD Learning Collaborative) in June 2020. The purpose of the SUD Learning Collaborative was to improve coordination across the continuum of prevention, treatment, and recovery services for individuals affected by SUD and opioid use disorder. From June 2020 through March 2021, Governor-appointed teams from six states — Kentucky, New York, Oregon, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming — engaged in strategic planning analysis, with the goal of addressing their state’s respective linkage to SUD care and treatment priorities. This report helps states address challenges related to these focus areas.

This playbook, developed in collaboration between the National Community Action Partnership and the American Public Human Services Association, explores how Community Action and human services agencies partnered together in response to the COVID-19 public health and economic crisis. It presents opportunities for alignment in providing whole family supports, making career pathways possible for SNAP recipients, and tackling structural inequities in accessing services. Examples of these alignments include western Maryland and Virginia (whole family supports), Minnesota and Oregon (SNAP Employment & Training), and rural Ohio and Montgomery County, Maryland (dismantling structural inequities).

This report evaluates four grantees of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Ready to Work (RTW) Partnership Grant (RTW) program. RTW assists the long-term unemployed—persons who have been out of work for at least 6 months—in finding jobs and succeeding in the labor market. Support services include career guidance, occupational training, employment readiness, job search assistance, and work-based training. The evaluation, which covers a four-year period from 2014 to 2018, reviews RTW implementation among four grantees: the Maryland Tech Connection program at the Anne Arundel Workforce Development Corporation; California Skills to Work in Technology/Job Search Accelerator at San Francisco’s Jewish Vocational Service; Finger Lakes Hired at RochesterWorks! (Monroe County, New York); and Reboot Northwest at Worksystems, Inc. in Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, Washington.

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 Focusing Efforts: Using Shared Data to Define and Advance Prevention Goals, which highlights lessons from the FAST-LC. These resources feature TANF and CW representatives from Oregon and Michigan who discuss how they use shared data to identify families’ needs and enhance their programs to help keep families together.

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 on Focusing Efforts: Using Shared Data to Define and Advance Prevention Goals, which highlights lessons from the FAST-LC. The video features TANF and CW representatives from Oregon and Michigan who discuss how they use shared data to identify families’ needs and enhance their programs to help keep families together.

This brief describes the American Public Human Services Association and Chapin Hall’s partnership to build momentum and consensus for child welfare system transformation by bringing together human services agency leadership, experts with lived experience, and national partner organizations to advance cross-sector recommendations for shared responsibility across public health and human services to prevent child maltreatment and unnecessary involvement with the child welfare system. This approach expands access to economic and concrete supports as protective factors and promotes family stability, integrity, and well-being at the individual and population level.

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.