The final report is now available! The Administration for Children and Families Regions VI and VIII and the Employment and Training Administration Region IV came together to host the Client Success through Partnership: 2010 TANF and Workforce Meeting in Dallas, Texas from July 25-27, 2010. The meeting contained a series of targeted discussion forums, interactive plenary sessions, and peer-to-peer breakouts coordinated to improve partnership and collaboration among TANF and workforce programs. Over the two and one-half days, attendees were exposed to a variety of sessions presented by more than 20 distinguished experts and peers from the TANF, workforce, social service, and research communities.

The Welfare Peer TA Network held a one day training on July 16, 2010 for the Workforce Solutions Texoma Board in Denison, Texas. The training, Motivational Interviewing: Creating a Culture of Work and Academic Achievement, was designed to help attendees identify strategies that motivate TANF participants to work and/or further their academic achievement. The training included a focus on motivating Texas TANF participants coded as exempt to participate in employment-related activities.

From the Center for Law and Social Policy, Maine’s Parents as Scholars (PaS) program provides services to Maine TANF participants who are pursuing two-year or four-year postsecondary degrees. The program is open to all TANF participants who did not previously have a bachelor’s degree in a field with available jobs or do not make 85 percent of Maine’s median income for their family size in their current field. Participants must remain full-time students, maintain at least a 2.0 grade point average, and must be on track to complete their degree programs in the usual two or four years.

The Urban Institute hosted this Web cast with four experts from across the social policy spectrum. Speakers discussed lessons learned from public policies and programs that they have had experienced in the line of their work. Panelists included Greg Berman, the director of the Center for Court Innovation; Martha R. Burt, an affiliated scholar with the Urban Institute and expert in homelessness, welfare, hunger, and social service delivery; Kevin Finneran, the editor-in-chief of Issues in Science and Technology; Olivia Golden, an Institute fellow at the Urban Institute whose work focuses on service delivery, leadership, and political strategies human services programs, and; Susan J. Popkin, an expert on assisted housing and mobility and a senior fellow at the Urban Institute.

As part of Phase 1 of the project (2007-2008), the TANF FBCO team collected information on 139 promising partnerships between Federal, State, or local governments and FBCOs that provide employment and self-sufficiency services to TANF participants and other low-income populations. This Compendium documents the core competencies and organizational components of each local organization. Site profiles identify each organization’s demographics, characteristics of the population served, services and outcomes, and information on their partnership. From this information search, 23 programs were selected for further study.

This innovative program highlight is from the Center on Law and Social Policy, and provides information on the Arkansas Career Pathways Initiative (CPI) program. CPI provides academic and support services for low-income, low-skill individuals to acquire the degrees and credentials necessary to secure a job. The program is funded with TANF dollars, and students are eligible for the program if they are adult caretakers of children under 21 and have incomes below 250 percent of the federal poverty line.

This innovative program highlight is from the Center on Law and Social Policy, and provides information on Kentucky’s Ready-to-Work program. A collaboration between the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services and the Kentucky Community and Technical College System (KCTCS), this program helps TANF participants pursue postsecondary degrees at Kentucky community and technical colleges.

From the Government Accountability Office (GAO), this report provides information on an evaluation that the GAO is conducting on the uses of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Recovery Act). In this report, the GAO provides an update of the status of agencies’ efforts to implement previous GAO recommendations, and also makes new recommendations to improve accountability to the Departments of Education, Transportation (DOT), Energy (DOE), Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Treasury, Labor, and Health and Human Services, and to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

This report is from MDRC and includes an evaluation of the Family Rewards cash transfer program in New York City, which began in 2007. The program offers cash rewards to specific family activities and outcomes to help families address immediate barriers but also to build human capital. Among the preliminary findings, researchers found that the program reduced current poverty and hardship, including hunger and some housing and health care hardships.

Chapin Hall conducted this study on multi-system families in Illinois and their use of services. Families using two or more social service programs consume 86 percent of the funding allocated for services. Researchers identify characteristics of multi-system families that receive more than one service from five programs, including mental health, substance abuse, foster care, adult incarceration, and juvenile incarceration.