The United States Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Office of Family Assistance (OFA) and Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) and the United States Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (ETA) hosted a technical assistance teleconference for Newark, New Jersey’s Workforce Investment Administration. As an outgrowth of the OFA-sponsored Collaboration Initiative, Newark requested additional technical assistance on an innovative non-custodial parent initiative being integrated into the child support enforcement and workforce administrations in San Antonio, Texas.

This fact sheet is from the National Center for Children in Poverty and provides information on how the United States government measures poverty, and offers alternative ways for measuring economic hardship. Currently, the official poverty measure in 2009 is $22,050 a year for a family of four and $18,310 for a family of three, which is used to determine eligibility for public programs. Authors suggest creating a measure that accounts for regional differences would help families to better understand families in poverty across the country.

The Children’s Future Initiative was designed to prepare young children for achieving successful outcomes in school in Trenton, New Jersey. From Public/Private Ventures, this report offers key strategies employed from the Initiative, and offers information on program implementation, participant recruitment, and collaborations among Trenton’s agencies. Early findings include that this effort has started making changes in the institutional level to help agencies better serve children from birth to age three.

The capstone event for the Rural Communities Initiative was the Rural Leadership Forum that took place in Charleston, South Carolina on September 1-2, 2009. Representatives from the 16 rural TANF sites met to share lessons learned; explore leadership and sustainability plans; and discuss successes garnered and challenges encountered from the implementation of the Rural TANF sites’ TA plans over the past year.

From the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, this resource gives an overview of the TANF provisions in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. The Act Created an Emergency Contingency Fund under which states can receive 80 percent federal funding for increases (relative to a base year quarter) in certain TANF-related expenditures in federal fiscal years 2009 and 2010.

The Rural Communities Initiative conducted a Site Visit to the White Mountain Apache Tribal TANF Program based on their request for TA. Rural Communities Initiative staff partnered with consultants from the U.C. Davis Extension at the University of California to provide the Tribe with an in-depth needs assessment in order to strategize on developing solutions for programmatic improvement. The consultants, Julie Gondry and Dr. Geni Cowan, are Tribal TANF subject matter experts with program based skills in training, case management, and data reporting. Based upon the assessment results, the White Mountain Apache Tribal TANF Program will receive valuable recommendations to further enhance aspects of their program’s structure and administration to reach the end goal of self-sufficiency for their TANF participants.

Designed to serve as a guide for policymakers and practitioners, from Public/Private Ventures (P/PV), this piece outlines key strategies for replicating social programs. P/PV has had 30 years of experience designing, testing and replicating social programs, and this report outlines key structures that should be in place before replication is considered.

The Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation conducted this study to better understand the characteristics and participation of American Indians and Alaska Natives in State and Tribal TANF programs over time. Researchers conducted comparisons between Tribal and non-Tribal caseloads across State TANF programs.

These resources are from the Welfare Peer TA Network workshop and include information specifically on increasing caseloads.

The Rural Communities Academy was the "kick off" event for the 16 selected rural sites and included time for each rural site team (consisting of four/five team members) to participate in information gathering, networking, and action planning. The team members who attended the Academy participated in workshops and plenary sessions, and met with Rural Content Specialists and representatives from other rural communities who shared their insight into strategies being utilized in rural areas with TANF participants.