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.

This report from the Foundation for Child Development highlights the benefits of dual-generation programs in terms of children’s outcomes. Specifically, research shows the many disparities between children whose mothers had not graduated from high school and children whose mothers had obtained a bachelor’s degree. Children whose mothers had not graduated from high school experience higher rates of poverty, lower rates of mathematics and reading proficiencies, a lower likelihood of graduating high school on time, and poorer overall health. The report also spotlights dual-generation programs in Tulsa, Oklahoma and Los Angeles, California. Finally, the authors offer policy options for all levels of government to develop and implement successful dual-generation programs.

The Child Welfare Information Gateway released a brief that provides an overview of the crossover between the child welfare and human trafficking fields. There is a particular focus on sex trafficking of children and youth, since that type of trafficking is more likely to affect the child welfare population. This resource includes background information, highlights of Federal legislation, and recommendations for child welfare agencies to address this issue.

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) agencies are operating in a challenging post-recession environment with growing program demands and shrinking state and local budgets. This brief describes the changing demands on state TANF programs, and how states have responded. It also describes opportunities for growth and improvement that TANF programs might consider.