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.

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.

Healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) grantees often face implementation challenges, such as difficulty in recruiting and encouraging participants to participate in services. To help address these common challenges, HMRE practitioners should engage in continuous quality improvement (CQI) to identify the most pressing challenges and test potential strategies designed to address them. However, accessing the information and resources needed to inform the CQI process may not always be feasible for all HMRE grantees. This guide is designed to bridge this gap by providing a set of promising approaches and accompanying strategies to address common challenges within the context of HMRE service delivery. The guide highlights strategies that practitioners can adopt, refine, and test through their own CQI process and ultimately use to improve their HMRE services. It was produced as part of the Strengthening Implementation of Marriage and Relationship Programs (SIMR) project.

Recognizing fathers’ importance to their families, as well as the difficulties that many fathers with low incomes face supporting their children, the federal government has supported responsible fatherhood (RF) programs for more than a decade. Many questions, however, remain about how to best serve fathers and their families. To identify current gaps in the knowledge base for Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood programming, the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) undertook the Fatherhood, Relationships, and Marriage — Illuminating the Next Generation of Research (FRAMING Research) project. The project convened a series of technical work groups to discuss issues related to research on RF programs. This brief describes the third work group session’s meeting discussion, which focused on fostering trust among fathers who participate in RF programs and recruiting and retaining young fathers in services.

Some healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) programs offer economic stability services in addition to relationship skills education. The Office of Family Assistance (OFA) funds community-based programs that offer HMRE and economic stability services as part of their Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood grant programs. This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation brief offers lessons for HMRE program providers seeking to integrate HMRE and economic stability services and examines two social service agencies that received federal grants from OFA —The Parenting Center in Fort Worth, Texas, and Family and Workforce Centers of America in St. Louis, Missouri—to design and implement such integrated programs.

Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education (HMRE) programming is designed to teach participants how to communicate effectively, manage conflict, identify signs of an unhealthy relationship, and other skills important for developing and maintaining healthy relationships. While research evaluating HMRE programming effectiveness shows that programming often has positive impacts, research also points out that many program participants face additional life stressors that may interfere with healthy couple relationships and family functioning. This brief uses data from a sample of Hispanic couples who participated in an HMRE evaluation to show the prevalence of some of the key economic, demographic, and personal stressors that research identifies as predictive of relationship quality. Some of the key findings of the study reflect that some stressors cannot be eliminated by HMRE programs, and that other stressors (e.g., housing hardship or poor health) can be addressed by utilization of other social service programs, such as TANF, Medicaid, or subsidized housing.

In recent years, many healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) programs serving couples with low incomes have offered participants economic stability services in addition to traditional HMRE programming focused on relationship skills. The Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services (STREAMS) evaluation included an impact study of Empowering Families, an HMRE program with integrated economic stability services for couples with low incomes raising children together. The program was implemented by The Parenting Center, a community-based social services provider in Fort Worth, Texas. Empowering Families’ core service was an eight-session workshop that taught relationship skills integrated with content on employment and financial literacy. The program supplemented this workshop with one-on-one employment counseling and financial coaching services.

This brief presents six considerations for practitioners who want to try using text message reminders to increase participation at the first session of a voluntary program and regular attendance thereafter. The considerations are drawn from a recent study assessing the effectiveness of text message reminders in promoting couples’ attendance at a voluntary healthy marriage and relationship education workshop in Florida. The study was conducted as part of the Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services evaluation for the Administration for Children and Families.

Healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) programs for youth provide young people with information on the social and emotional aspects of romantic relationships through structured, classroom-based curricula. Programs are typically offered as part of a school class, such as health or family and consumer sciences, or as a voluntary afterschool or community-based program. Prepared as part of the Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services evaluation, this brief examines four recent studies of HMRE programs for youth and discusses possible ways to strengthen their implementation and evaluation. The brief also presents several practical considerations to inform future evaluations and increase the chances for programs to show evidence of favorable impacts on their intended outcomes.