Massachusetts leads the way in providing social workers the resources they need to combat the opioid crisis. The Governor created a Social Work Education Working Group on Substance Misuse, which has partnered with the National Association of Social Workers and local social work graduate schools to develop a unified framework for caseworkers to manage substance abuse. This report outlines the core principles of their strategy, which will be implemented statewide in social work curriculum. The guidelines include the Primary Prevention Domain of Preventing Substance Misuse, the Secondary Prevention Domain of Caring for Individuals At-Risk for Substance Use Disorders, and the Tertiary Prevention Domain of Managing Substance Use Disorders as a Chronic Disease. Within these three realms, the working group lists subareas of focus. This outline can be used as an example for other states or practitioners looking to develop supportive and standardized curriculum for those on the front lines of the opioid epidemic.

This report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers documents the data on the opioid crisis from a public health standpoint and the economic costs of opioid-related fatalities at the macro level.

The National Center for Health Statistics presents a data visualization, drawn from the National Vital Statistics System, for drug overdose deaths for all 50 states and the District of Columbia. This data series compares the percentage changes in provisional drug overdose deaths in the current 12 month period with the previous 12 months. There is also data to indicate the reported and predicted provisional counts by month.

This journal article presents data to illustrate how the death rate from opioids among Native Americans has risen significantly over the last 17 years. The authors also discuss tribal medical and legal responses to the opioid epidemic, including tribally-operated medication assisted therapies and drug diversion courts.

This Urban Institute policy brief reviews the extent that children’s negative behavioral outcomes continue after their fathers have been released from incarceration. The brief compares negative outcomes, such as outward displays of aggression or internalized expressions, including withdrawal or anxiety, among children when their fathers are incarcerated and when they are released with outcomes of those children whose fathers have never been incarcerated.

The U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness will begin to issue a set of six fact sheets through its blog “Home, Together” to bridge a connection between early care and education providers and housing and homelessness services providers. The fact sheets intend to support a whole-family approach that addresses the needs and strengths of parents and children experiencing homelessness. The sheets also strive to improve the integration of early childhood homelessness data into a broader community-wide planning strategy that seeks to make homelessness a brief and one-time occurrence.

The Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE) seeks material from stakeholders on hearing quality and judicial decision-making in child welfare cases. OPRE encourages submissions of findings from related programs, research reports, tools, and local datasets, among other relevant resources. The information gathered will be used to develop the Understanding Judicial Decision-Making and Hearing Quality in Child Welfare project that will look at how hearing quality and the court decision-making process affect case planning, child well-being, and family outcomes. Materials should be emailed to cwhearingquality@acf.hhs.gov by January 31, 2019.

This interactive data dashboard, developed as a collaborative research project between the U.S. Census Bureau and researchers from Harvard University and Brown University, is a comprehensive Census tract-level dataset of children’s outcomes in adulthood using data from almost the entire U.S. population. In particular, the tract analysis estimates childhood outcomes in adulthood, to include earnings and incarceration rate, as they correlate to parents’ income, race, and gender. The outcomes can be traced to the poverty and incarceration rates occurring in the census tracts where the children grew up.

The Office of Family Assistance hosted a webinar entitled "Building Social Capital for Families on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and Other Low-Income Populations: The Important Role of Community-Based and Faith-Based Organizations" on Wednesday, November 28, 2018. Many efforts to stop the cycle of poverty have focused on employment as the answer, especially after the legislation of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 and the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) of 2014. However, TANF eligible families need access to forms of capital beyond economic capital to move out of poverty. These families benefit from access to trust-based networks that provide other types of resources, also known as social capital.

Community-Based Organizations (CBOs) and Faith-Based Organizations (FBOs) play a critical role in providing culturally sensitive social capital to TANF eligible families that create pathways out of poverty as they are embedded in the communities they serve. In this webinar, participants heard from FBOs and CBOs that serve TANF eligible families.

Qaadirah Abdur-Rahim from the Future Foundation and Juanita Epps from Pathways Virginia presented.

This working paper from the Upjohn Institute identifies how over half of registering households in multiple states leave SNAP within one year of entry, rather than complete administrative requirements to receive benefits. The paper’s author studied Michigan and combined administrative SNAP and Unemployment Insurance records; findings are relevant for case managers in states other than Michigan.