This Child Welfare Information Gateway podcast discusses the National Training and Development Curriculum (NTDC) for Foster and Adoptive Parents, an organization developed to provide free curriculum and resources for potential foster or adoptive parents to give them the information and tools they need to parent a child that has experienced trauma, separation, or loss. Podcast topics include common technical and implementation challenges and knowledge gaps that current training presents to child welfare agencies and trainers; how NTDC for Foster and Adoptive Parents offers trainers and facilitators flexibility to meet both their jurisdictions and parents’ needs; key messages woven throughout the curriculum’s themes to help parents understand trauma, culture, and how to best respond to conflict; and takeaways participants have shared with their facilitators.

This blog entry discusses the potential impact of new state legislation in South Carolina that seeks to tap into federal funding to help cover the costs of its extended foster care programming, which serves young adults between the ages of 18 and 21. The federal funding is expected to be allocated towards employing more caseworkers and tailoring support to meet the needs of more young people across the state.

Both the early childhood and child welfare systems are investing in promising new ways to support families with young children, particularly as they strive to recover from COVID-19 challenges and to become more equitable. These investments are creating new opportunities for child welfare and early childhood systems to align services and collaborate across both systems to better support children. This brief provides a rationale for better coordination between the two systems, followed by recommendations for alignment and examples of strong alignment in the field. Recommendations are structured around three main areas of opportunity for coordination: preventing child abuse and neglect, supporting children and families with open child welfare cases, and creating stronger functionality and supports in both systems.

A healthy relationship can play a critical role in establishing family stability for both adults and children. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has taken a toll on families nationwide with reports of higher rates of stress and declining marriages. Understanding the importance of healthy relationships in promoting economic stability among TANF recipients, the Office of Family Assistance (OFA) awards Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education (HMRE) grants for a variety of programs working to integrate skills-based relationship education into employment services. During this June 28, 2022 OFA webinar, HMRE grantees and subject matter experts discussed the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on marriage and relationships. Webinar participants learned numerous ways HMRE grantees are engaging clients in programming such as family stability, healthy relationships, and economic security; explored how HMRE grantees adjusted during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how their clients benefited from the pandemic adaptations; and heard about how these grantees will utilize lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic to improve future efforts.

Webinar speakers included: Nikkole Abbas, Director of Family Support and Advocacy Services, Youth and Family Services of South Dakota; Robert Ketchum, Data Manager/Adult Educator, Youth and Family Services of South Dakota; and Mariana Falconier, Associate Professor of Family Science in the School of Public Health and Project Director of the University of Maryland’s TOGETHER program. The webinar was moderated by Robyn Cenizal, Project Director, Family Strengthening, ICF.

This brief shares lessons from four employment coaching programs that made major changes to their operations during the COVID-19 pandemic. The discussion provides employment programs information about modifying service delivery and meeting client needs. The lessons learned from the programs in this study may help other programs provide coaching during a public health crisis or other type of emergency.

This report details the rate of youth unemployment by racial demographic during the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The study described in the report includes unemployment trends by age group and racial make-up using both state and national level data. Among its findings was that while unemployment decreased during the second year of the pandemic as businesses reopened and the American Rescue Plan was implemented, Black youth continued to have the highest unemployment followed by Latinos and, further, that recoveries in the labor market did not lessen racial and ethnic disparities.

Though the tech industry offers opportunities for high-quality, rewarding jobs, traditional pipelines of workers seldom meet employers’ growing demands. Meanwhile, workers with tech aptitude have found it challenging to break into the industry if they lack formal credentials or direct job experience. In recent years, one promising solution for this mismatch has been registered apprenticeship.

The Urban Institute will host a discussion on June 22, 2022 from 3:00 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. ET where employers, apprentices, and educators will share what they learned about launching tech apprenticeship programs—including an innovative degree-based apprenticeship led by a consortium of historically Black colleges and universities—and discuss where the field is headed.

The American Rescue Plan temporarily increased the child tax credit (CTC) in 2021, including extending the credit to families who had not previously filed tax returns. The Internal Revenue Service automatically sent monthly payments of the CTC to families that had filed a tax return in 2019 or 2020. This report reviews the work of the Birth through Eight Strategy for Tulsa, an initiative to find low-income families who were likely to miss out on receiving the CTC. It also identifies how Tulsa’s existing network of service navigators worked to connect families eligible for the credit with tax preparation services to claim the CTC.

About 20 percent of U.S. American children grow up in poverty, and family income during early childhood is strongly associated with educational attainment and other social and economic outcomes. It can be difficult to separate the effects of family resources, however, from other aspects of a child’s early life, including family structure and stability, parenting styles, and the qualities of a neighborhood and schools. This research brief examines the effectiveness of unrestricted cash support for families facing economic hardship by estimating the long-run causal effects of cash transfers immediately after the birth of a first child.

On January 4, 2022, the U.S. Department of Labor issued a Training and Employment Notice providing local workforce boards, American Job Centers, workforce development partners, and grantees with information on supporting community violence intervention strategies that include an employment or workforce component. This brief offers recommendations for supporting the design and implementation of community violence interventions, based on research and evidence-based practice.