Supporting healthy development begins in early childhood. To support their children and optimize family well-being, parents need access to high-quality early care and education (ECE) services, as well as support for broader family needs, such as nutrition, home visiting, parenting skills, or employment. ACF sponsored the Assessing Models of Coordinated Services (AMCS) study to deepen understanding of programs, groups, agencies, or organizations that coordinate ECE with other health and human services (referred to in this report as coordinated services approaches). This report describes the study’s qualitative data collection, presents models of coordinated services at the state and local level, and reports findings about state and local coordinated services approaches.

The Administration for Children and Families (ACF) has published several resources under Project SPARK and Project IMPROVE. Both projects — conducted in close coordination by the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE) and the Office of Family Assistance (OFA), respectively — supported 17 research-practice partnerships to help TANF agencies design and implement evidence-informed program changes.

These available publications include the Learn, Innovate, Improve (LI2) practice guide, which outlines LI2, a program improvement approach used by many TANF and human services agencies under Projects SPARK and IMPROVE. Briefs that document the implementation of LI2 feature the Iowa Department of Human Rights (assessing a virtual home visiting program), the New York City Human Resources Administration (redesigning an intake assessment for families receiving cash assistance), and the Baltimore City Health Department (designing and implementing a transitional jobs program).

Also available are briefs on innovative approaches to technology and participant engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic and how to support mental wellness for staff and participants, as well as a podcast about how the pandemic prompted human services agencies to rethink their internal and external operations.

Student loan forgiveness is one way to recognize the important work of the human services workforce and to motivate individuals to join or remain in public service professions. Employees of a federal, state, or local tribal government agency or a non-profit are eligible for federal loan forgiveness after making 120 payments. The 15-year-old U.S. Department of Education’s Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program (PSLF) has been overhauled to expand eligibility and make it easier to navigate. This important fix allows more federal student loan borrowers to easily access PSLF and obtain the relief the program promised. These changes are time limited. Some borrowers will need to consolidate their federal loans and/or submit a PSLF form by October 31, 2022 to take advantage of this opportunity.

ACF has created the PSLF landing page that includes resources with information on eligibility and tools for getting the word out. The page includes a recording of the March 31 webinar hosted by the Office of Early Childhood Development in partnership with the Department of Education, attended by over 17,000 early educators. This recording, as well as PDFs and Frequently Asked Questions, are also housed on the site. 

The National Association of Workforce Development Professionals will host a webinar on September 15, 2022 from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. CT which will cover how workforce professionals have the opportunity at every customer touch point to make an impact, even through the smallest interactions.

This webinar focuses on making excellence the standard, not the exception, and identifies strategies and tactics to help professionals become more excellent. The webinar will discuss ways to increase excellence in customer interactions, in workspaces, in emotional intelligence, in connections with partners, and in programs. Learning objectives include:

• Defining and understanding what excellence is, and what excellence is not.
• Distinguishing average and excellent, and learning strategies to pursue excellence in every customer interaction.
• Role playing, using specific situations that front line staff face, and taking that situation and implementing strategies to ensure staff are operating in excellence, even in difficult situations.

A registration fee for attendance is required.

Since the establishment of the Child Support Enforcement Program in 1975, child support policy has played a central role in improving the economic circumstances of children living apart from one of their parents. Prior research has documented the policy’s positive effects on family economic wellbeing at the time of receipt. But little work has examined the effects of child support receipt as a child on economic outcomes in adulthood. This report uses analytic approaches to test whether adults who received support as children have higher earnings, are more likely to be employed, have lower public program participation, receive less in public benefits, and are less likely to have an open child support case than those who did not receive child support or received very little.

This article discusses how partners within the County of San Diego formed two programs, Developmental Screening & Enhancement Program (DSEP) and KidSTART, aimed at ensuring that children in foster care 5 years old or younger receive needed services to maintain placement stability, achieve timely permanency, and reach their full potential. Both programs operate under Rady Children’s Hospital San Diego. DSEP provides developmental and behavior screening and service linkages for all young children involved with the County of San Diego’s Child Welfare Services (CWS), while KidSTART provides comprehensive services to young children with complex needs, regardless of system involvement.

This blog offers an array of sources for understanding special population characteristics and demographics in the labor force, and for using labor market information to help target services and design service delivery to special populations. These populations could include (but are not limited to) veterans, older workers, long term employed, or disabled individuals. Included are key workforce data sources for planning and designing services to special populations, data sources for program staff to use in service delivery, and tools and training to access and utilize data sources effectively.

Mentoring is integral to apprenticeship programs and plays a critical role in the success and retention of young apprentices. Mentors can help apprentices navigate the workplace, develop a combination of essential and technical skills, and deepen their engagement. In turn, mentors find value in developing leadership and management skills and sharing organizational insights. This fact sheet highlights the importance of mentoring in youth apprenticeship programs. It illustrates mentor roles and the ways mentors teach and advise. Also, the fact sheet provides some reflective questions mentors can ask as well as real-life challenging examples that mentors can use.

The Strengthening the Implementation of Responsible Fatherhood Programs (SIRF) project uses rapid learning cycles in an effort to improve the enrollment, engagement, and retention of fathers in nine current federal Fatherhood Family-focused, Interconnected, Resilient, and Essential (FIRE) grantees and one former recipient of a federal fatherhood grant. This brief illustrates how SIRF and program teams used a human-centered design technique called customer journey mapping, a collaborative process that puts the needs and goals of participants at the center of efforts to design or improve a product or service. Mapping helped both the program and SIRF teams to better understand fathers’ program experiences and perspectives, and to identify where program processes might be restructured to increase fathers’ participation.

This brief describes the experiences of nine families with low incomes and their children during the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic, from March through September 2020. The research was conducted by interviews with 9 adults from three major U.S. cities in September 2020. Its key findings were that families experienced a sense of uncertainty and constant, unpredictable change in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Further, as the pandemic evolved, the multiple life fluctuations it caused significantly affected their economic circumstances and emotional well-being.