This Administration for Children and Families blogpost, authored by the Director of the Office of Head Start and Early Childhood Development, identifies the reach of Head Start programs to serve children within families that experience homelessness and the links between Head Start and other human service agencies. Additionally, the blogpost links to Head Start training opportunities that include eight interactive learning modules that lead to receiving professional development certificates, and notes three forthcoming webinars that share effective practices for building organizational readiness, developing partnerships, and addressing service challenges in local Head Start communities.

This Upjohn Institute policy brief analyzes the long-run outcomes of Earned Income Tax Credit and welfare time limits to increase employment and reduce public assistance; the brief also reviews the impact of anti-poverty programs on geographical locations where participants live. The research and analysis examine these anti-poverty programs and whether they have made a difference not only for individual households and participants, but also for disadvantaged neighborhoods.

This Urban Institute report highlights qualitative data to explain the reasons why low-wage workers apply for public assistance initially. The report is drawn from interviews with 40 individuals who recently separated from low-wage work and received or participated in Medicaid, SNAP, the Minnesota Family Investment Program, cash assistance, or unemployment insurance. The focus of the study is to understand why workers lose or leave low-wage work and how these workers get by on low and fluctuating income; these factors can determine worker outcomes for receiving assistance and improved outcomes for self-sufficiency.

The term “chronic scarcity” was coined by behavioral economist Sendhil Mullainathan and psychologist Eldar Shafir in their book, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much (published by Henry Holt & Company, 2013). This book articulates the ways that scarcity creates and perpetuates poverty and how scarcity leads people to shuffle resources and prioritize for urgent roles. From a policy perspective, the authors present an example of how training programs need to offer alternative meeting times to prevent participant attrition. As well, they suggest that time limits can effectively motivate TANF participants to prioritize identifying and securing employment.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service will host a webinar on July 18, 2019 from 1:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. ET to discuss the use of intermediaries in the administration of SNAP E&T programs. Intermediaries are organizations that conduct required administrative tasks and support State SNAP programs by centralizing operations and fiscal reporting. The webinar will include speakers from Goodwill of North Georgia, Portland (Oregon) Community College, and Worksystems (the local Workforce Investment Board in Portland, Oregon) who will discuss the benefits, challenges, and opportunities of each of their models.

This Chapin Hall issue brief reviews: child welfare workers’ perceptions of county-level availability of training and the range of services available for transition-age foster youth; workers’ views about the collaboration between child welfare departments and other service delivery systems; and the correlation between foster youth satisfaction with training and services and outcomes in education, homelessness, employment and health. The analysis relies on longitudinal studies from the California Youth Transitions to Adulthood Study (CalYOUTH) conducted in 2013 and 2015. Report findings point to the need for increased collaboration among child welfare and other systems, as well as connection of foster youths’ satisfaction with offered services to support service delivery.

This Urban Institute report reviews the use of outcomes-based contracts (OBCs), which tie government payments to improvements in service delivery. The report examines the benefit of using OBCs to incentivize performance from external contactors, as well as the challenges and risks in administration and effect on service delivery. Findings are drawn from field interviews and external researchers.

More than half the caseload of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program consists of child-only cases, in which a child receives TANF cash assistance but the parent or caregiver does not. The most common type of child-only case is a nonparent caregiver case, consisting of children being cared for by someone other than their parents, often a grandparent. Research suggests that nonparent caregiver cases are often vulnerable with many unmet needs and that the children in these cases share characteristics with children living in foster care: mental health conditions, school-related problems, and experience with trauma. Kinship navigator programs can be an important tool for supporting these families. Most states are developing or expanding these programs, and the federal government has provided funding in fiscal years 2018 and 2019 to state and eligible tribal child welfare agencies to develop, enhance, or evaluate kinship navigator programs. The Family First Prevention Services Act amended the Social Security Act to allow title IV-E agencies to receive funding for kinship navigator programs that meet certain evidence-based criteria; see ACYF-CB-PI-18-11 for program requirements.

On July 16, 2019, the Office of Family Assistance, in collaboration with the Children’s Bureau, sponsored a webinar that featured kinship navigator programs operating in three states and the services they offer to nonparent caregivers. Arizona Kinship Support Services connects kinship families to government benefits, links them to legal services, and helps them navigate existing community support systems. California’s UWCA-211-iFoster Kinship Navigator Collaborative provides an online, self-service resource portal for kinship families that coordinates public and private resources based on the families’ individual needs and preferences. The New York State Kinship Navigator provides an information and referral network for kinship caregivers statewide. In addition to these three states, the webinar featured a representative from the Children’s Bureau who discussed the federal funding available for kinship navigator programs and a representative from the Assisting Special Populations to Improve Readiness and Engagement (ASPIRE) study team who shared information on TANF child-only cases.

This report identifies the state of current research on the prevalence of opioid use disorder and treatment services among Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) participants and the TANF-eligible population. Additional emphasis is provided on how opioid use disorder negatively affects work-readiness and employment attainment. Funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Children and Families, this project aims to improve economic well-being and increase TANF agencies’ knowledge base. This report is based on a literature review of opioid use disorder treatment strategies and information on the effects of opioids in the TANF, TANF-eligible, and low-income populations.

The Office of Family Assistance hosted a webinar on Wednesday, July 31, 2019 showcasing several Social Enterprise Organizations (SEOs) and their unique strengths, challenges, and contexts. SEOs are hybrid organizations that aim to balance business and social missions. They use a profit-maximizing approach to solve society’s challenges and help improve individual and community well-being. SEOs target hard-to-serve populations to help remove barriers to self-sufficiency by offering opportunities such as employment, housing, or mental and physical health services. Various strategies, such as workforce training, job placement, microfinancing, literacy resources, and offering affordable health services, are just some of the approaches used by social enterprises in pursuing their missions. SEOs are unique because they use capital investment to create a social benefit and revenue, which allows the organizations to be self-sufficient. Social enterprises are a promising solution to helping resolve social problems in the future.