This Office of Family Assistance Program Instruction (PI) reminds TANF jurisdictions that federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and Maintenance-of-Effort (MOE) funds cannot be used to provide juvenile justice services. The Office of Family Assistance identified that several states are using federal TANF and/or MOE funds to provide services to individuals who are under the jurisdiction of the state's juvenile justice system. This PI is to remind TANF agencies about established policy in this area.

In this interactive feature from the Center on the Developing Child, users will learn how the choices our government and service-providers make can help children and their communities as a whole become more resilient in the face of significant challenges.

This Information Memorandum (IM) encourages TANF and child welfare agencies to coordinate and share data on the children, youth, and families they both serve. It reminds TANF programs that they are permitted under federal law to determine their own confidentiality rules and recommends cross-training and information sharing across TANF and child welfare to maximize resources and services, and help families meet the requirements of both programs.

This fact sheet for community organizations and leaders offers recommendations for handling economic downturns within communities. Topics include instilling a sense of safety, calming the public, self-efficacy, and hope. The publication explains that community organizations are in a unique position to lead, partner with others, and inspire essential changes to help their communities overcome hardship.

Child support is a critical source of income, especially for the growing population of children born to unmarried mothers. Given many single mothers’ limited earnings potential, child support from non-custodial fathers is also important. This paper uses data from a statewide randomized experiment conducted in Wisconsin in order to address the effects of child support on custodial mothers’ labor supply, and whether policies that increase child support receipt will discourage mothers’ employment. The evidence indicated that there is no negative effect of child support on the likelihood to work for pay or the number of hours worked in a given week. These results suggest that custodial mothers’ child support collections and their labor supply may be compatible and that the absence of a negative labor supply effect strengthens the potential antipoverty effectiveness of child support.

A recent release from the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP) analyzed their newly updated 50-State Policy Tracker, an interactive online tool for comparing safety net policies critical to the economic security of working families. It reveals significant disparities between different states, demonstrating that a person’s state of residence can greatly impact his or her future success. This tool includes data by state among ten critical social programs: child care subsidies, child and dependent care tax credit, Earned Income Tax Credit, family and medical leave, income tax policy, Medicaid/Children’s Health Insurance Program, minimum wage, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and unemployment insurance.

This document from the EMPath explains what is meant by the term "coaching," both in terms of definition and practice. The resource will present the reasons coaching is used at EMPath, define the basic components of how coaching is completed, and focus on usable information for practitioners and policymakers.

This resource provides tables that compile Federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and Maintenance-of-Effort (MOE) expenditures from Fiscal Year 2014, as reported by the states.

Colorado Works, Colorado’s TANF agency, created this handbook to compile best practices that enhance the well-being, safety, and economic security of domestic violence survivors who come into contact with TANF. The handbook provides the business case for collaboration between TANF and domestic violence agencies, describes how domestic violence is interrelated with poverty and TANF, and how application of the Family Violence Option in TANF can help survivors and their children. Best practices include building effective collaboration between TANF and domestic violence agencies and co-locating domestic violence advocates in a TANF agency.

This 2014 memo from ACF provides domestic violence training, resources, and potential opportunities for collaboration between TANF agencies and their partners. Resources include information on TANF’s Family Violence Option, which allows states to establish a special program within TANF to serve victims of domestic violence. There is also information provided on assessing a family’s domestic violence history during TANF intake, and partnering with domestic violence shelter programs to provide training for human services staff. The memo ends with lists of domestic violence hotlines, webinars, culturally specific resources, and other national domestic violence resources.