The ACF Office of Family Assistance (OFA) hosted a webinar to summarize the open Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM): Strengthening TANF as a Safety Net and Work Program and instructed interested parties on how to submit a formal comment.

The NPRM is intended to strengthen TANF's role in supporting family well-being and work, as well as creating additional accountability for states to ensure TANF funds serve their intended purpose, while maintaining state flexibility. 

Review the recording here as you are preparing to submit formal comments on the NPRM for HHS consideration. Comments are due December 1, 2023. HHS welcomes comments from all affected parties and will closely review and consider every comment it receives. We refer you to the NPRM on information on how to submit comments if you wish to do so. 

If you have questions about the webinar, please email TANFquestions@acf.hhs.gov. 

Many of the men who participate in fatherhood programs may have experienced trauma from adverse childhood experiences, community violence, or incarceration. Traumatic experiences can have a negative impact on fathers’ own functioning as well as on their children’s well-being, particularly for men of color or those with low incomes. In recent years, fatherhood programs and other social service providers have become more aware of how traumatic experiences can impact program participants. However, there is still a need to ensure that practitioners incorporate recognized, trauma-informed (TI) practices into their services. This MDRC brief provides practical information and easy-to-use tools designed to support TI practices in a fatherhood program context.

Many effective services promote healthy development in early childhood and support families’ well-being that are located across sectors. These include high-quality childcare and early education (CCEE), and support for other family health, educational, and financial needs. It can be challenging for families to benefit from all these services because they all function separately, typically in different locations and with differing eligibility, enrollment, and service provision requirements. Potential roadblocks can exacerbate disparities because they affect marginalized families the most. This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation study provided an in-depth look at different approaches to coordinating CCEE with other health and human services.

In recent years, policymakers and researchers have questioned the fairness and effectiveness of pursuing civil contempt to secure child support payments, particularly for parents with low incomes. Civil contempt proceedings are costly, burdensome, and often counterproductive to the goals of the child support program. They can impede employment, increase child support debt, alienate noncustodial parents from their children, and decrease parents’ future cooperation. Developed by the Office of Child Support Services, the Procedural Justice-Informed Alternatives to Contempt (PJAC) demonstration assessed a different approach to improving child support payments. PJAC services aimed to address noncustodial parents’ reasons for nonpayment, promote positive engagement with the child support program and the other parent, and improve the consistency and completeness of their payments. This MDRC report compares the benefits and costs of PJAC services with those of business-as-usual child support enforcement.

Kinship navigator programs are services that assist kinship caregivers in learning about and using programs and resources to meet the needs of the children they are raising, to provide support for the caregivers, and to promote partnerships among public and private agencies. These programs work to improve caregivers’ knowledge of services and assist them in accessing the services they need to support the family’s ongoing stability. This Chapin Hall brief reviews the four kinship navigator programs currently rated as either “promising” or “supported” on the Title IV-E Clearinghouse and the innovative practices and program components in developing models. It provides potential recommendations for child welfare leaders who are considering designing or implementing their own kinship navigator program.

The Division of Economic Independence (DEI), operated within the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE), has primary responsibility for welfare and family self-sufficiency research. DEI’s publications are aimed to expand knowledge about how Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and other programs can best support the self-sufficiency and economic well-being of children and families with low incomes. This OPRE portfolio describes all the active or newly funded projects by DEI in Fiscal Year 2022. The document provides detailed summaries of each family self-sufficiency research project and highlights select findings.

Children living in families with low incomes face an array of challenges that place them at much higher risk of experiencing poverty in adulthood as compared with other children. This cycle of intergenerational poverty poses an economic disadvantage to not only the children and their families but also the nation. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) will host a webinar on September 21, 2023 from 11:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. ET on the NASEM report entitled Reducing Intergenerational Poverty that examines the drivers of long-term, intergenerational poverty, identifies potential policies and programs to reduce it, addresses gaps in data and research, and highlights the disproportionate effect of disadvantage to different racial/ethnic groups. The webinar will include a discussion of the report's key findings and questions from webinar participants.

Columbia University's Center on Poverty and Social Policy will co-host a virtual session on September 21, 2023 from 1:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. EDT to discuss the policy takeaways from the COVID-19 pandemic for reducing poverty and promoting economic well-being moving forward. This webinar will include a policy panel to discuss the challenges faced by low-income households, how the federal government achieved a record-low poverty rate in 2020 and again in 2021, and what lessons ought to be carried forward from those experiences.