During the COVID-19 pandemic, human services agencies faced unique challenges to adapt services to meet new needs while supporting the staff delivering these services. The impact of this period is still felt today, with families adjusting to ending pandemic programs and communities experiencing human services workforce shortages. However, these challenges also spurred innovation in how people support each other. This Administration for Children and Families resource discusses how ACF catalyzed a new employee-centric program that has helped define their agency culture and advanced their work in communities.

Capturing a clear picture of Americans’ financial lives involves looking at not only financial metrics but also the circumstances that shape people’s everyday lives, such as access to health care and affordable childcare. However, creating this holistic understanding can be difficult. Researchers and local officials must navigate a fragmented data landscape, which makes it challenging to understand people’s financial lives, much less develop solutions to improve them.

The Urban Institute’s Financial Well-Being Data Hub developed a tool to address the challenge by allowing users to browse financial well-being metrics across publicly available datasets. The tool’s more than 300 metrics include core measures of financial well-being, such as the value of household assets and debts, and contextual factors that shape people’s financial lives, such as disruptions due to climate-driven events. Users can filter metrics by data source, geography, and topic.

Nonprofit organizations that offer youth development and young adult talent development services have increasingly centered the voices of the young people who are participating in their programs. They have accomplished this by infusing youth-centered practices into their programming and, more formally, creating leadership opportunities such as youth councils and alumni associations. This Jobs for the Future brief draws from interviews with program leaders and the young people they have hired to highlight how and why organizations have brought young people into paid staff positions, what the experience has been like for them, and the meaning they are making of their experience. This brief highlights four organizations in the Learn and Earn to Achieve Potential (LEAP) initiative. LEAP is a national initiative of the Annie E. Casey Foundation that aims to help youth and young adults ages 14–25 who have been involved in the child welfare or juvenile justice systems, parenting youth or youth who have experienced homelessness succeed in school and at work by building and expanding education and employment pathways.

Many low-income working parents rely on subsidized childcare. The program supports qualifying families to work or attend school, many of whom may be unable to afford market-rate childcare. Examining parents’ income and employment patterns can guide policymakers to optimally structure subsidized childcare to support sustained employment and improve program engagement. This Chapin Hall brief series focuses on the work, school, and childcare engagement of Illinois families enrolled in the Child Care Assistance Program. This brief series includes:

1. Parental Need for Child Care Assistance;
2. Where Parents Work; and
3. Earnings & Child Care Assistance After One Year. 

This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation brief explores Addiction Recovery Care (ARC), a large-scale program in Kentucky combining residential clinical treatment for substance use disorders (SUDs) with employment services. ARC operates in several locations across the state, but is located primarily in rural, Appalachian areas hard-hit by the opioid crisis. This SUD residential treatment and recovery service is combined with employment services including job readiness training, internships, and online courses leading to a range of short-term occupational certifications. Employment services are provided in the later phases of the residential program when participants are relatively stabilized in terms of their SUD recovery. This brief offers recommendations for those implementing similar programs or that are interested in developing them.

The San Francisco Department of Child Support Services (SF DCSS) has piloted a voluntary program that explores an alternative to monthly cash payments, allowing parents to meet their child support obligations through agreed-upon, in-kind contributions. This approach acknowledges how some parents already contribute to their children and empowers them to flexibly address their families’ changing needs. It is modeled after the Yurok Tribe’s child support system, which allows parents to support their children in ways beyond monetary support, including providing diapers, fish, firewood, and child care. This Urban Institute fact sheet summarizes the implementation process of this pilot as an introduction for other counties that may be considering offering in-kind child support alternatives.

In February 2024, the Office of Child Support Services (OCSS) announced a new rule - Elimination of Tribal Non-Federal Share Requirement (ACF-OCSS-AT-24-02) - which supports the growth of the tribal child support program by eliminating burdensome costs. It will make it easier for existing and new tribal child support programs to access the funding they need to operate. This OCSS resource announces the new rule and highlights the impact it will have on tribal child support programs.

Today, 60 federally recognized sovereign tribes and tribal consortia in 22 states implement Title IV-D tribal child support programs. This Institute for Research on Poverty literature review provides an overview of laws and policies that shape tribal child support programs; investigates the demographic and economic contexts of tribal communities; describes state and tribal program implementation; summarizes the small body of academic research regarding tribal child support programs and outcomes; and concludes with opportunities for future investigation.

States, counties, and tribes are modernizing their child support programs through holistic, family-centered policies and practices that build partnerships with parents instead of adversarial relationships. They go beyond collecting money to address underlying reasons for nonpayment, ensure that children benefit from payments, and facilitate effective co-parenting. Family-centered child support policies put children where they belong: at the center of child support policymaking. The Centering Child Well-Being in Child Support Policy toolkit, developed by Ascend at Aspen Institute, features new analysis of state child support director survey data. The toolkit offers innovations on: 

1. Family Distribution,
2. Reducing Arrears,
3. Right-Sizing Orders,
4. Income Supports,
5. Supporting Healthy Co-Parenting, and 
6. Providing Equal Access to Justice.