This blogpost draws upon assessments of the Housing Opportunities and Services Together Initiative and the Family Centered Community Change program and presents four key elements that made their two-generation initiatives successful. These elements include employing engaged coaches or case managers to help families, providing “glue” money to support service partnerships and staff time for program coordination, developing strong partnerships focused on a common goal of supporting families, and selecting an effective backbone organization to provide for or raise funds to ensure the two-generation initiative’s sustainability.

This report, a review of the current state of the two-generation model, explains the components for two-generation approaches, including physical and mental health, early childhood development, K-12 education, postsecondary education and employment pathways, economic asset building, social capital, and the assumptions behind designing programs that simultaneously improve outcomes for children and families. Also, the report identifies the impacts of implementing two-generation approaches, lessons learned, and recommendations for future action.

Over the past ten years, only a few states have invested TANF and TANF-related funds on healthy marriage and relationship-related services. This National Healthy Marriage Resource Center fact sheet outlines how TANF funds can be used to fund programs that develop and maintain healthy marriages/families. The fact sheet highlights economic and physical data that supports this public policy initiative and justifies the investment of public funds in healthy marriage activities.

Research shows that parents and children tend to fare better on a range of outcomes when they live in low-conflict, two-parent families. Recognizing the potential benefits of healthy relationships for low-income families, Congress has funded several rounds of grants for Healthy Marriage (HM) programs since 2006. These grants aim to promote the well-being and long-term success of children and families by fostering parents’ relationship stability and economic well-being. This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation brief presents the impacts of HM programs about one year after study enrollment on: 

• the status and quality of the couples’ relationships;
• the co-parenting relationships; and
• job and career advancement.

The Empowering Families program, as a part of the Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services (STREAMS) evaluation, a large multisite evaluation conducted from 2015 to 2022 to identify strategies for improving the delivery and effectiveness of healthy marriage and relationship education program, included an eight-session workshop that integrated Healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) content with information on financial literacy and job and career advancement. The HMRE content came from Family Wellness, a relationship skills and parenting curriculum designed to promote healthy family interactions. The program supplemented workshops with one-on-one services, including case management, financial coaching, and employment counseling. This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation report describes the impact of the Empowering Families program after one year. The report also provides information on program implementation and costs.

At the 2024 National Fatherhood Summit, participants learned how TANF funding can support fatherhood programs. Attendees learned how fatherhood programming fits into the purposes of TANF, how some states are using their TANF funds to support fathers, and how cross-agency partnerships can support and encourage responsible fatherhood. The presenters also shared promising practices for recruiting, serving, retaining, and engaging fathers.

Healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) programs aim to support the well-being of families. For such programs to be effective, it is critical that clients attend regularly, yet studies have found that HMRE program providers sometimes struggle to maintain high rates of participation. Identifying and exploring typical participation patterns in HMRE programming can increase understanding of this challenge and point to ways in which programs can promote and support regular participation. This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation brief describes typical patterns of participation in three programs that were part of the Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services (STREAMS) evaluation, a large multisite evaluation conducted from 2015 to 2022 to identify strategies for improving the delivery and effectiveness of healthy marriage and relationship education programs. The brief identifies distinct patterns of participation in each of these programs and provides profiles of the clients who participate in these distinct ways.

This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation digital report shares highlights from the Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services (STREAMS) evaluation, a large multisite evaluation conducted from 2015 to 2022 to identify strategies for improving the delivery and effectiveness of healthy marriage and relationship education programs. This report describes the five grantees —in Georgia, Florida, Denver, Missouri, and Texas— and the services they provided. To capture the perspectives and experiences of the people most directly affected by the programs, this report also tells the personal stories of some of the program staff and participants who contributed to STREAMS.

The findings from the Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services (STREAMS) impact studies, a large multisite evaluation conducted from 2015 to 2022 to identify strategies for improving the delivery and effectiveness of healthy marriage and relationship education programs, are summarized in this Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation webpage. The webpage offers a series of site-specific impact reports which present findings from additional exploratory analyses and discuss the implications of the impact findings for healthy marriage and relationship education programming and research.

This Office on Planning, Research and Evaluation infographic highlights the findings from a meta-analysis conducted as part of a large-scale federal evaluation called Testing Identified Elements for Success in Fatherhood Programs (Fatherhood TIES). Fatherhood TIES identifies fatherhood program core components and then rigorously tests the impact of the core components on outcomes related to fathers’ parenting, healthy relationships with coparents, individual well-being, and economic stability; the findings offer new information about what components of a fatherhood program might most affect fathers’ parenting knowledge and skills, well-being, and healthy relationships with co-parents, as well as their economic stability.