This blogpost from the Commissioner of the Administration on Children, Youth and Families profiles the Handle with Care (HWC) program, which is an intervention focused on trauma-informed responses among law enforcement, schools, and mental health providers to address exposure to adverse childhood experiences. The HWC program initially began in 2013 in Charleston, West Virginia and aims to ensure that children exposed to crime, violence, or abuse can receive interventions to support their ability to succeed in school. The HWC model relies upon law enforcement to share a “handle with care” notice with an affected child’s school if law enforcement has been at the affected child’s household the night before to address an incidence of violence or crime at home.

This podcast series of three episodes discusses how networks and relationship building constitute social capital. The episodes, entitled “Close-Knit Communities for Better Outcomes: Using Peer Groups,” “Friend Request Accepted: Using Technology and Social Capital,” and “Beyond Icebreakers: How to Help Participants Really Connect,” include discussions with health and human service experts who offer ways to help program participants create and access social capital and improve their outcomes. The podcast is hosted by Anita Brown Graham of the ncIMPACT initiative at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention within the U.S. Department of Justice will host a webinar on July 30, 2020 from 2:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. ET which will focus on serving adolescents in family drug courts. Emphasis will be on encouraging youth to engage in building positive relationships with adults and peers and to be actively involved in developing their own voice as they transition into adulthood. Strategies for substance use prevention and treatment and information on recovery support will also be addressed.

The Office of Human Services Policy at the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation will host a virtual training series and offer concrete strategies for organizations working with incarcerated/reentering participants to help them improve their outcomes through building and leveraging social capital. The series will also describe considerations for measuring social capital. The first of these virtual training sessions will be held on August 4, 2020 from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. ET. Subsequent sessions will be held bi-weekly on Tuesdays during the same time slot.

This dataset from the Annie E. Casey Foundation is the 31st edition that follows and ranks states on metrics related to child well-being. The data reflects trends prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Particular focus is on four larger categories of trend analysis: economic well-being, education, family and community, and health. Additionally, there are individual state profiles with relevant data that are presented as user-friendly fact sheets.

This issue brief identifies characteristics of noncustodial parents in the Procedural Justice-Informed Alternatives to Contempt (PJAC) demonstration project in six child support agencies across the country. The brief also includes assessments from case managers who use these characteristics to determine the reasons why they believe these noncustodial parents fall into contempt of court orders. The brief findings are drawn from PJAC records for noncustodial parents enrolled through July 31, 2019 and from interviews with case managers conducted during the spring of 2019.

Stimulus checks, enhanced SNAP, and expanded unemployment insurance benefits enacted by the Federal government provided financial assistance to low-income individuals and families impacted by COVID-19 and lessened the rise of the poverty rate. This report includes individual state projected 2020 annual poverty rates with and without COVID-19 pandemic response policies. The report indicates that the policies implemented in the early months of the crisis will keep more than 10 million people out of poverty this year. These are initial projections based on current data, and the official data on poverty rates for 2020 will not be available until September 2021. This information is intended to help policymakers address the continuing hardships that families are facing and to initiate and implement policies that will support families and avoid rising poverty rates.

Modern digital technology, coupled with user-friendly and human-centered design and application, positively impacts delivery of critical and essential social supports to low-income families especially during COVID-19. This blog post details how the private sector has responded to the COVID crisis with technological solutions to help Federal, state, and local governments meet the needs of their most vulnerable populations. Nonprofit organizations have designed and made available to public-serving institutions technology to help low-income families access SNAP assistance, WIC supplements, energy saving programs, TANF funds, and other public safety benefits. While these tech-enabled processes and associated IT systems have streamlined the delivery process, there are still flaws in the existing system and gaps in the delivery mechanisms associated with accessing safety net programs that complicate access.

This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation tool supports Tribal TANF-Child Welfare Coordination grantees and human service partners as they identify and operationalize collaboration approaches and monitor the effectiveness of these approaches. There is also guidance on how to measure and track progress on coordination among partners. The tool includes details on options for completing, scoring, and interpreting Collaboration Assessment Tool results; the entire assessment tool is included in an appendix and as a separate downloadable Excel file.

This issue brief analyzes characteristics of the early care and education (ECE) workforce in Arkansas and identifies research on the correlation between high-quality ECE and child development, as well as ECE providers’ emotional well-being. The brief focuses on variance of the ECE workforce by region or in terms of rural versus urban relative to teachers’ and caregivers’ self-reports of well-being, economic pressures, and education levels. Also highlighted are the factors that stakeholders identify as contributing to the variation of these characteristics across the state.