Healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) programs for youth aim to improve young people’s understanding of romantic relationships and prepare them to have healthy romantic relationships in adolescence and adulthood. This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation brief summarizes the impact literature on these programs. The brief describes HMRE programs for youth, including the types of services they offer, how they are structured, the populations they serve, and their effectiveness.

The child welfare-to-prison pipeline describes the systems that funnel youth from the child welfare system into the juvenile justice system. The child welfare system often targets and disproportionately surveils black and brown families—largely those living in poverty and dealing with the challenges of mental health, substance use, and over-policing by the criminal legal system. The National Association of Counsel for Children (NACC) will host a webinar on March 22, 2022 from 1:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. ET. Speakers will stress the importance of strengthening community resources and preventing family disintegration as a tool to end the child welfare-to-prison pipeline. There is a registration fee for non-NACC members to attend this webinar.

The Administration for Children and Families will host a webinar on March 14, 2022 from 2:30 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. ET which will discuss approaches to supporting, growing, and strengthening the early childhood workforce in tribal communities. Tribal communities seek to ensure that early childhood program staff have the language, cultural, and community knowledge to implement culturally grounded programs that meet the needs of American Indian/Alaska Native children and families. They also have a strong interest in “growing their own” workforce by supporting members of the community, including former program participants, to become early childhood professionals. In the webinar, participants will hear an overview of issues related to supporting and strengthening the early childhood workforce in tribal communities, followed by a panel highlighting innovations and promising practices. Additionally, participants will be able to learn more about and discuss highlighted strategies with peers and hear about resources they can use in their own communities.

The Office of Family Assistance (OFA) hosted the Using the Pandemic Emergency Assistance Fund webinar on March 8 and 9, 2022. Separate sessions were held for states, tribes, and territories that administer PEAF funds. Established by the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, PEAF provides funding to states, tribes administering a TANF program, and all five U.S. territories to assist needy families impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic to use funds to provide certain non-recurrent, short term benefits.

During these webinars, OFA shared its newly developed brief, Responding to Winter Utility Needs: Using the Pandemic Emergency Assistance Fund and discussed how PEAF grantees can blend and braid PEAF allocations with other federal funds to help families with high utility costs. Current PEAF grantees also shared their PEAF experiences, and the webinar concluded with a facilitated discussion.

In this webinar, participants:

• Learned different approaches for distributing PEAF-funded cash assistance.
• Explored how COVID-19 impacted energy security for low-income families and how the Pandemic Emergency Assistance Fund can help.
• Heard from PEAF grantees who have allocated resources to help low-income families with utility assistance and other needs.

Each webinar was tailored to states, tribes, and territories administering PEAF resources.

Please note: Webinar recording for territories is unavailable. Please review the PowerPoint slides and/or watch the recording of the state webinar (see link below).

This playbook, developed in collaboration between the National Community Action Partnership and the American Public Human Services Association, explores how Community Action and human services agencies partnered together in response to the COVID-19 public health and economic crisis. It presents opportunities for alignment in providing whole family supports, making career pathways possible for SNAP recipients, and tackling structural inequities in accessing services. Examples of these alignments include western Maryland and Virginia (whole family supports), Minnesota and Oregon (SNAP Employment & Training), and rural Ohio and Montgomery County, Maryland (dismantling structural inequities).

Failing to practice self-care habits contributes to the stress caregivers feel and the problems they may experience with their own physical, mental, and emotional health. The likely outcome or consequence for a caregiver who is not taking care of him- or herself is burnout. This blogpost identifies causes of caregiver burnout, how these factors contribute to negative feelings, and how burnout can manifest itself in various ways.

This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation brief intends to help Responsible Fatherhood (RF) programs better serve fathers with criminal justice involvement by summarizing research on the effects of parenting programs for incarcerated and reentering fathers. The brief has three components:

• A description of parenting programs for incarcerated and reentering fathers, including the populations they serve and the types of services they offer,
• Highlights of what is known about the effectiveness of these programs from studies of parenting programs for incarcerated and reentering fathers, and
• A discussion of how the RF field can use this evidence to strengthen parenting services for fathers with criminal justice involvement.

Employers’ role in creating workplace policies and practices and the work environment has increased relevance for low-wage and historically marginalized workers because these persons often work in occupations with greater job and schedule instability and have fewer workplace protections and benefits. This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation brief discusses how employer-based work-family interventions can impact work and non-work outcomes for low-wage workers and their families, reviews select literature on work-family interventions, and provides strategies to engage and encourage employers to participate in studies of work-family interventions.

Workforce training programs in the United States have delivered inconsistent returns on investment to workers seeking better opportunities in the labor market. Hosted by WorkRise and J-PAL North America, this webinar on March 9, 2022 from 2:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. ET will discuss the power of randomized controlled trials in generating evidence to inform and guide decisionmaking and investment in workforce training. Speakers will share insights from a WorkRise-funded evaluation of the Pursuit Fellowship, a sectoral employment program that equips adults from under-resourced communities with the necessary skills to build careers in the high-wage technology sector.

In 2013, the Office of Family Assistance released Information Memorandum (TANF-ACF-IM-2013-01) “Use of TANF Funds to Serve Homeless Families and Families at Risk of Experiencing Homelessness” in recognition of the integral role TANF can play in family stability. That memorandum highlights the important role TANF can play in helping families experiencing homelessness, offers approaches for using TANF funding, and provides examples of existing state initiatives. To better understand how states and localities are currently using TANF funds to support families experiencing homelessness, the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE) funded a study. This brief summarizes different approaches that TANF agencies can pursue to provide housing and other related assistance.