The 2016 Systems to Family Stability National Policy Academy meeting was held on July 26-28, 2016 in Annapolis, Maryland at the Historic Inns of Annapolis. The Academy is an initiative that provides training and technical assistance to eight state and county Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) programs as they work on building internal and/or collaborative systems within and across agencies that improve family stability and economic self-sufficiency. Academy sites are focusing on a range of systems change activities, including two-generation approaches, TANF and Workforce system alignment, and enhanced assessment and case management approaches. The Academy meeting included plenary and breakout sessions across the listed content areas as well as time for participants to work with their own teams and with other teams for additional learning and peer feedback.

This webinar from the Ascend Network at the Aspen Institute highlighted the context and demographics of tribal communities, provided information about 2Gen practice efforts underway in Alaska Native and Native American communities, and offered insights about ways to incorporate family voices and traditions into programs. It highlighted the work of Cook Inlet Tribal Council, which serves Anchorage, Alaska and a large swath of the Alaskan interior, including some remote villages.

This video from the 2016 Research and Evaluation Conference on Self-Sufficiency (RECS) describes the Family Options Study, which is a random assignment study examining the impact of housing and services for homeless families in twelve communities across the United States. Topics covered include the study design, findings from the first 18 months, and the services needs of the families involved in the study.

Untreated maternal depression can interfere with a parent’s capacity to help their child develop, place a child’s safety and cognitive development at risk, and impede a family’s effort to become self-sufficient. This report from the Center on Law and Social Policy offers ideas for federal and state stakeholders to help low-income mothers with depression.

Homes for Families, Inc. developed this guide to help service providers, policymakers, community leaders, state agencies, and other stakeholders conduct comprehensive assessments of homeless families. The guide defines assessment, describes the importance of a two-generation model, and presents implications for policy and practice.

Early childhood experiences form the foundation of brain architecture and can have lasting positive or negative impacts on learning, behavior, and health. Today’s best programs and practices can help support child development, but many children are still left behind. This report from the Center on the Developing Child considers lessons learned from five decades of program evaluation research, identifies five core principles to inform policymaking and program development, and discusses the importance of investing in research and development to better the lives of America’s children. The core principles identified include building caregiver skills; matching interventions to sources of significant stress; and supporting the health of the mother and child before, during, and after pregnancy.

Conditional cash transfer programs offer cash assistance to low-income families to reduce immediate hardship, but base this assistance on actions such as investing in children’s educational achievement and family preventive health care, in the hope of improving children’s longer-term success. Evaluations of these programs have found some important successes in reducing poverty and increasing investments in children. Opportunity NYC – Family Rewards is the first comprehensive conditional cash transfer program to be implemented and evaluated in a higher-income country. This article from the Institute for Research on Poverty summarizes a study that looked at whether and how school quality affected Family Rewards program effects on high school students’ educational processes and achievement. This study considers the role of school context in examining the results of a conditional cash transfer program on educational outcomes, and uses an expanded set of outcomes that include children’s approaches to schooling, parental investment in their children, and academic achievement.