This Annie E. Casey Foundation brief shares six pivotal strategies for coordinating and funding community efforts to support families at risk of entering the child welfare system: invest in infrastructure at the state and local levels, create funding structures that maximize prevention funds, support community-led planning and design, align programs at the state level to better serve families, invest in evaluation, and leverage private and local dedicated funding streams. Strategies presented in this brief include practices from Colorado, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nebraska, Washington State, and the District of Columbia.

The Procedural Justice-Informed Alternatives to Contempt (PJAC) demonstration project, which began in 2016, integrates principles of procedural justice into enforcement practices in six child support agencies across the United States. This guide assists child support agencies to develop more people-centered practices using the principles of procedural justice to build trust, better engage participants, and create a more fair and effective process for serving families and supporting children.

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 last in a three-part series, this podcast discusses strategies in the BSC within Prowers County, Colorado. Topics discussed include:

• The flexibility and innovation small child welfare agencies can have in comparison to larger, more bureaucratic agencies
• The collective accountability child welfare and partner human service agencies shared in Prowers County to engage and involve fathers and paternal families in their casework and prevention efforts
• The "must-haves" necessary to spark and sustain culture change

The Welfare Rules Database tracks state TANF policies over time, from 1996 to the present. The database includes hundreds of variables related to initial eligibility, benefit amounts, work and activity requirements, and ongoing eligibility and time limits. This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation report provides dozens of tables detailing selected state policies for 2020.

While most racial wealth gaps analyses focus on total asset holdings, intergenerational transfers, or disparities in specific assets, less attention has been paid to debt. Although there has been analysis of racial disparities in mortgages, and recent research has illuminated the role of student loans in widening the wealth gap between Black and white households, debt remains under-appreciated as a driver of racial wealth gaps. This brief explores links between racial disparities in debt and those in wealth and reflects findings from a literature review, interviews with experts, analysis of federal survey data, and focus groups and consumer surveys.

Family-engaged case planning is a new model for the initial stage of the juvenile probation process where juvenile probation officers formulate case plans by collaborating with young people and their families. This approach is necessary to align probation with powerful studies on adolescent brain development and effective responses to delinquent behavior. This Practice Guide covers:

• Why family engagement is important—and a departure from the status quo.
• Three stages of the family-engaged case planning model.
• Advice on adapting this model to local jurisdictions.
• Six common challenges to meaningfully engaging families.

This comprehensive child welfare resource provides state and national data on child maltreatment, foster care, kinship caregiving, and adoption from foster care. Data profiles are available by state. Also available for download is a companion guide which explains how stakeholders can interpret and use the data.

Fathers have encountered challenges that may affect their romantic and coparenting relationships during the COVID-19 pandemic. These include increased unemployment, issues around child access and visitation, and difficulties navigating work-from-home arrangements. COVID-19 also created unique hurdles for fatherhood programs in providing services to fathers, and many of these programs were required to swiftly shift from in-person to virtual service delivery. This brief describes how COVID-19 affected fathers’ relationships and healthy relationship programming provided by fatherhood programs and offers strategies that these programs can adopt to better support fathers’ coparenting and romantic relationships.

Research has shown that policies and practices in the child care subsidy system can prevent families from accessing and keeping child care benefits that ensure their children receive care in stable, quality settings. This fact sheet highlights lessons from research and seven ways states can make child care more accessible and equitable for families and more efficient for agencies:

• Examine customer service flexibility, quality, and efficiency
• Simplify application, reporting, and verification requirements
• Change eligibility thresholds
• Talk with parents, providers, and caseworkers to identify barriers to subsidy access and retention
• Improve coordination across programs
• Align and integrate policies and systems across programs
• Build data, information, and reporting capacity.

Providing access to tangible resources can strengthen families and communities by avoiding and de-escalating crises, reducing parental stress, increasing access to safe housing and reliable childcare, and ensuring children have the material items they need to thrive. This brief discusses the impact of community-based strategies, connections, and collaborations that offer economic supports to address families’ basic needs, keeping children safe and families together. These include housing supports, food assistance, financial supports, employment assistance, early care and education services, legal services, and medical and behavioral health care.