The Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) recently launched a Fact Sheet Series. The child support program serves a quarter of all children and half of all poor children. Created primarily to recover welfare costs, Congress has steadily embraced a broader mission for the child support program through legislative change, resulting in a gradual shift to a program that promotes child well-being and family self-sufficiency by making child support a reliable source of income.

While working well for most families, the program has faced a greater challenge serving low-income parents. To improve child support outcomes for all, State child support agencies are now using a wide range of family-centered innovations to increase the ability of parents to support their children, in recognition that collection of support depends on the noncustodial parent’s employment, cooperation between parents, and parents’ emotional connection with their children.

Often, the most effective way to make sure that children can count on regular child support payments is to address the underlying reasons parents are not paying their obligations, whether they are unemployment, parental conflict, or disengagement. State child support agencies are partnering with fatherhood, workforce, and reentry programs in outreach, referral, case management and other strategies that are often organized into six areas:

1. Preventing the need for child support enforcement,

2. Engaging fathers from the birth of their first child,

3. Promoting family economic stability,

4. Helping build healthy family relationships,

5. Ensuring that families have meaningful health care coverage, and

6. Preventing and reducing family violence.

To celebrate Father’s Day, OCSE released a series of fact sheets highlighting how child support innovations in each of these areas can improve child support and child well-being. The fact sheets provide examples of promising practices from across the country.

The Annie E. Casey Foundation and the Commonwealth of Virginia collaborated to reduce the number of children in foster care and reduce the use of congregate care. This report provides an overview of their efforts by building a family-centered child welfare practice model. Through this model, the Commonwealth increased permanency rates and access to community-based care, and reduced overall spending.

For many years the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program has been integrating economic, work, and program services with other safety-net programs to improve the available supports for low-income and working families. The impact of the recent recession has provided additional impetus to improve better-coordinated service delivery systems. From the desire to simplify and streamline client processes to improving service effectiveness, integrating TANF with workforce, child support, child welfare, SNAP, medical assistance, and education is key to increasing economic self-sufficiency. On October 26-27, 2010, The Administration for Children and Families, Office of Family Assistance, Regions V and VII convened the Innovation through Integration: 2010 Heartland TANF Conference in Chicago, Illinois to bring together safety-net partners in an effort to enhance service integration and outcomes for TANF participants. The conference topics included TANF reauthorization, improving interoperability, serving immigrants and refugees, increasing work participation, employer engagement and program sustainability, domestic violence, and career development. The peer-focused conference sought to bridge the gaps between programs and begin the foundation for future technical assistance, program development, and integration.

Savings accounts that are started when children are born can allow parents to build savings to pay for college, home ownership, and businesses. This report is from the Center for Social Development, the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED), the Initiative on Financial Security at the Aspen Institute, the New America Foundation and the University of Kansas’ School of Social Welfare, and presents results from research on families who participated in child development account pilot programs in 12 states and communities.

The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act emphasized the importance of finding and maintaining employment among welfare recipients. Important to maintaining employment is reliable and affordable child care. In this working paper, authors examine the role of child care subsidies on work-related disruptions in a longitudinal analysis. The results show that work disruptions related to child care are less likely among recipients receiving child care subsidies.

From the Institute for the Study of Labor, this study looks at the influence of child care subsidies on child health and well-being. Child care subsidies have recently played an increased role in supporting the transition from welfare to work, but research is lacking in regard to child health outcomes in relation to these subsidies. Results from this study found that subsidy use is associated with increases in Body Mass Index (BMI) and a greater likelihood of being overweight and obese, mainly for children in center-based care.

The Hoopa Valley Positive Indian Family Network in California requested technical assistance (TA) from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Office of Family Assistance to help improve Hoopa Valley’s Positive Indian Family Network and their collaboration with other Hoopa Valley human service agencies, particularly Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). The Network operates through a Tribal TANF-Child Welfare Coordination Grant. An event was held on July 8-9, 2008, that focused on wraparound case management practices and the Systems of Care framework from the perspective of the Medicine Moon Initiative through the Native American Training Institute.

The Collaboration Institute was held in Arlington, Virginia on September 15-17, 2008. The meeting was designed for teams from medium-sized urban areas composed of three partners representing senior level managers from TANF, Child Support Enforcement, and Workforce Development agencies. The Institute provided a hands-on intensive opportunity for strategic planning and culminated in the development of an action plan to be implemented upon return to participants’ jurisdictions. The areas of focus during the Institute were on: ways to increase collaboration between State and local TANF, Workforce Development, and Child Support Enforcement agencies; examining the close link between welfare, workforce development, and child support; understanding how collaborative efforts are addressing State work participation rates; and providing a platform for key issues in child support and workforce development that impact TANF participants.

Staff from the Healthy Family/Healthy Child Project in Siletz, Oregon, submitted a technical assistance (TA) request to the Welfare Peer TA Network in hopes of increasing their knowledge around collaborating among their tribal service agencies to better serve their TANF and Child Welfare participants. The Healthy Family/Healthy Child Project operates through a Tribal TANF-Child Welfare Coordination Grant from the U.S. Department of Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Office of Family Assistance. In response to the request, an event was held on December 3-5, 2008 that focused on wraparound case management practices and the Systems of Care (SOC) framework from the perspective of the Medicine Moon Initiative through the Native American Training Institute. Deb Painte, Director of the Medicine Moon Initiative, Jan Birkland, Sacred Child Project Coordinator for the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, and Claresa Blacksmith, Parent Coordinator for the St. Mary’s Parent Support Group of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, facilitated the meeting.

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 gave tribal governments’ new authority to structure and administer their own cash assistance, employment and training, child care, and child support enforcement programs. This report describes some current characteristics of tribal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) programs and emerging challenges in serving tribal members through tribal and state TANF programs. It also presents findings from recent studies on welfare reform's impact on tribal members and explores tribal issues likely to be raised during TANF reauthorization in 2002.