The Office of Family Assistance has awarded and overseen federal funding for four cohorts of healthy marriage (HM) and responsible fatherhood (RF) grant programs (2006-2011, 2011-2015, 2015-2020, and 2020-2025). The HM grantees promote healthy marriage and relationships through eight legislatively authorized activities, such as marriage and relationship education and development of skills for job and career advancement. RF grantees’ legislatively authorized activities promote responsible parenting, healthy marriage, and economic stability. This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation brief shares what was learned after visits with grantees about factors that have helped or hindered successful implementation of the 2015-2020 cohort of grantees, focusing on approaches to staffing programs and working with partners.

The Fathers & Families Coalition of America will host its 23rd Annual National Conference as a hybrid event from March 8 to March 11, 2022 in Los Angeles, California. The conference will feature a Roundtable Series covering child support, engaging families, child welfare, disparities in education, and local to national policy impacting practices; 10 Workshop Strands; and Fireside General Sessions. Also included are credential or certificate programs and networking opportunities. Conference registration includes a fee for in-person and virtual participants.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated housing instability for families with low incomes and created an even greater need for affordable, stable housing. Two-generation programs, which strive to end intergenerational poverty by supporting both parents and children living in the same household to improve life outcomes for the whole family, are one model of effective collaboration to increase housing stability. This blogpost, based on research on multiple two-generation partnerships, identifies four key elements to using two-generational programs to promote housing stability.

The Fathers and Continuous Learning in Child Welfare (FCL) project sought to improve placement stability and permanency outcomes for children by engaging their fathers and paternal relatives. FCL implemented a methodology known as the Breakthrough Series Collaborative (BSC), a continuous learning methodology. The first of a three-part series, this podcast discusses strategies implemented in one agency participating in the BSC in Hartford, Connecticut to create a culture in their child welfare system that prioritizes thinking about and engaging fathers and paternal relatives. The podcast covers the benefits of including community partners and fatherhood advocates in Connecticut’s improvement team.

This Children’s Bureau resource guide recognizes that there are actions that communities, organizations, and families can take to address the root causes of child abuse and neglect. It highlights innovative ways that communities conduct purposeful prevention work to help children and families thrive using a protective factors approach. This approach focuses on positive ways to engage families by emphasizing their strengths and by identifying areas where they have room to grow with support. The guide includes English and Spanish versions of conversation guides that help to engage parents and caregivers in personalized conversations with service providers about protective factors and how they want to care for their children and themselves.

Part of a larger project sponsored by the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services called Key Programmatic Elements of Engaging Fathers to Promote Self-Sufficiency (KEEP Fathers Engaged), this fact sheet explores three strategies for child support agencies to engage fathers and improve family stability. The strategies are: 1) focus outreach on the emotional and other nonfinancial contributions fathers make to children’s well-being; 2) develop partnerships to help fathers achieve their full potential; and 3) use data and evaluation to support sustaining father engagement. The fact sheet provides brief sketches of how these strategies were used within the Georgia Division of Child Support Services, the Texas Office of the Attorney General’s Child Support Division, and at the Mecklenburg County, North Carolina Child Support Enforcement.

These briefs are blueprint fact sheets showcasing the accomplishments of peers and stakeholders in implementing a whole family approach at seven Community Action Agencies: Aroostook County Action Program (Presque Isle, Maine), Blueprints (Washington, Pennsylvania), Community Action, Inc. (Topeka, Kansas), Community Action Project of Tulsa County (Tulsa, Oklahoma), Community Action Partnership of Sonoma County (Santa Rosa, California), Mahube-Otwa Community Action Partnership (Detroit Lakes, Minnesota), and People, Inc. (Abingdon, Virginia). Each brief details the agency, its area demographics, its whole family approach with a highlight of the program’s innovation story, successes, a profile of a program participant, challenges, wisdom (lessons learned), the program’s building block focus, and a timeline for implementation.

This blogpost references a Generations United report’s policy and practice recommendations on how to better support grandfamilies. Included in the report are findings from the first nationwide survey of grandfamilies during COVID-19, which revealed heightened needs related to housing, food insecurity, and alternative care plans. The report contains policy and practice recommendations that would provide better support to these families, such as increases in TANF funding for monthly child-only grants to mirror foster care maintenance payments and improved access to TANF child-only grants through a simplified application process and expanded community outreach. The report also depicts racial overrepresentation in grandfamilies, and the blogpost highlights the benefits of kin caregiving.

As part of the Building Bridges and Bonds (B3) study, the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation sought to identify new and promising approaches to supporting fathers working toward economic stability and improved relationships with their children. This report presents findings and lessons from one part of the B3 study: a rigorous evaluation of the Cognitive Behavioral Intervention for Justice Involved Individuals Seeking Employment (CBI-Emp). CBI-Emp is an intervention that applies cognitive behavioral skill building to help people who have been involved in the justice system maintain employment. The report builds on previously released findings about the implementation of the CBI-Emp curriculum and summarizes the implementation results and lessons learned. The report also describes the effects of the curriculum and provides estimates of program costs.

Home visiting programs have been shown to support healthy child development, increase family economic independence and positive parenting practices, and decrease child maltreatment. This research-to-practice brief examines the evidence of impact of the SafeCare® model, a home visiting program implemented by the Oklahoma Department of Human Services (OKDHS) and the Arkansas Department of Human Services (ADHS). The OKDHS and ADHS experiences offer insights and lessons for other jurisdictions considering SafeCare as part of the Title IV-E Prevention Plan under the Family First Prevention Services Act.