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.

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.

The Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, Mathematica, and The Adjacent Possible will jointly host a webinar on March 14, 2022 from 3:00 p.m. to 4:15 p.m. ET to highlight innovative strategies used by state and local TANF programs during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic to adapt service delivery and promote staff and client well-being. Speakers will share the findings of two briefs published by Project SPARK (Supporting Partnerships to Advance Research and Knowledge). The webinar will be interactive with two primary purposes for participants: engage in a sense-making exercise with the research themes, and explore ways of applying and experimenting with the innovations.

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.

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.