The Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE) will convene the 2024 Research and Evaluation Conference on Self-Sufficiency (RECS) in person in Washington, DC on May 29–31, 2024. RECS 2024 will focus on programs, policies, and services that support families on the path to economic self-sufficiency. Presentations will feature research findings and their policy and practice implications for an audience that includes researchers, practitioners, state and local administrators, federal officials, and policymakers. Join OPRE for a virtual information session on Thursday, June 22, 2023 from 1:00 to 2:00 p.m. ET to hear more about the conference, conference tracks, proposal types, tips for preparing a successful proposal, and how to submit a proposal through the website.

Parents, extended family, and communities are all responsible for promoting children’s well-being and protecting them from trauma. When children cannot remain safely with their parents, child welfare experts view kinship foster care as a best practice and seek opportunities to promote a “kin first” approach. This Chapin Hall policy brief identifies how kinship families form, details evidence of how kinship diversion programs operate, and offers policy and practice recommendations on how to explore, make meaning of, and implement changes to child welfare agencies’ kinship diversion practices.

Working with previously untapped community partners helps kinship-serving agencies to better empower and sustain kinship families. The Grandfamilies & Kinship Support Network will host a webinar on June 13, 2023 from 2:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. ET featuring a panel representing national organizations, including Family Resource Centers, that have local programming in communities across the country. Speakers will share how and why they began supporting kinship families and provide strategies for approaching untapped collaborators and working with them to serve local communities.

Federally funded Responsible Fatherhood programs work with fathers to promote healthy relationships and marriages, strengthen parenting practices, and help fathers attain economic stability. For programs to improve fathers’ outcomes, they need to be able to recruit fathers, engage them in services, and keep them actively participating in program activities. However, social service programs often struggle to engage participants in their services. The Strengthening the Implementation of Responsible Fatherhood Programs (SIRF) study was aimed at addressing this difficulty with fatherhood programs. This brief summarizes how cycles of 10 fatherhood programs participating in SIRF were designed and implemented, and provides an overview of the study’s overall findings.

Case management is a common component of healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) services. Many social service programs are beginning to explore a motivation-driven approach to case management that prioritizes identifying the goals that participants want to achieve and the steps they can take to achieve those goals. Two HMRE grant recipients, Family Service Agency of Santa Barbara County (FSA-SB) and More Than Conquerors, Inc. (MTCI), implemented motivation-driven case management through the Strengthening the Implementation of Marriage and Relationship Programs (SIMR) project, which aims to strengthen the capacity of HMRE grant recipients to improve their services. This brief provides practical tips for implementing motivation-driven case management as part of HMRE services based on the experiences of FSA-SB and MTCI.

This comprehensive child welfare resource provides state and national data on child maltreatment, foster care, kinship caregiving, permanency, and older youth in care. The data are essential to help policymakers understand how many children and youth come in contact with the child welfare system, and why. States can use this information to ensure that their child welfare systems support the safety, stability, and well-being of all families in their state.

Healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) staff are essential for successful implementation of HMRE services, including recruiting and enrolling participants, delivering curriculum workshops, providing case management, and carrying out the behind-the-scenes work that makes an organization run smoothly. Research points to three key factors that can affect high-quality service delivery: (1) capacity (whether staff have the necessary knowledge and skills to provide the services), (2) motivation (whether staff have buy-in and confidence to deliver the services), and (3) opportunity (whether the work environment and resources enable staff to perform at their best).

This brief presents four tips for supporting HMRE staff and examples from the experiences of the HMRE grant recipients who participated in the Strengthening the Implementation of Marriage and Relationship Programs (SIMR) study. The SIMR study was designed to develop and test promising approaches to address implementation challenges related to recruitment, retention, and content engagement in HMRE services.

Healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) programs can struggle to recruit and enroll participants. This is often the first challenge new programs encounter as they move from planning to implementing their services. Because of this challenge, an important component of many successful recruitment strategies is to develop partnerships with other organizations in the community that can refer potential participants. This brief identifies partnership tips from Anthem Strong Families (Dallas), Family Service Agency-Santa Barbara, and Gateway Community Action (West Liberty, Kentucky); each of these organizations are HMRE grant recipients who participated in rapid cycle learning to strengthen their recruitment partnerships.