This Administration for Children and Families (ACF) letter outlines the Trump-Vance administration’s approach to the TANF pilot project, aligning with its commitment to promoting work and reducing dependency. ACF will release a solicitation for proposals shortly and will work to meet statutory deadlines and select a new cohort of states for the pilot later this year.

Human service agency administrators, researchers, and policymakers increasingly turn to applied data analytics to evaluate programs or inform policy. Applications of the data may vary but the goal is the same: to improve the lives of the families served. This webinar highlights a toolkit developed through the Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation-funded TANF Data Collaborative to help agencies build the culture and infrastructure needed to apply data analysis routinely, effectively, and accurately. The webinar discusses some of the key strategies and tools included in the Toolkit that can serve as a helpful resource for building sustainable data use in human service agencies.

This National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse resource provides tips for fatherhood programs to:

1. Plan Strategically;
2. Develop and Maintain Solid Partnerships;
3. Document and Evaluate;
4. Tell Their Story;
5. Respond to Changing Social Contexts;
6. Develop Multiple Funding Sources; and
7. Lead Systems Change.

This National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse state profile examines the interaction between fathers and programs funded by the West Virginia Department of Human Services to support families, particularly the program services available through the TANF program.

This Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services webpage highlights faith and community partnerships, including services ranging from faith-focused counseling, family programming, faith-based programming, and more.

Ron Desantis’ Faith and Community Initiative was launched in August 2019 to support those on the front lines of serving Floridians. The resources highlighted on their webpage aid faith institutions and community organizations with tools to support and enhance their work to serve their community.

There are impoverished families who are discouraged from pursuing upward mobility through work, reacting to what they perceive as perverse incentives woven into the government safety net – or “benefit cliffs.” This Sutherland Institute report evaluates the economic decision-making of safety net participants based on their understanding of the programs they use. The report answers these questions: 

1. Are Utahns who participate in government assistance programs changing their economic behavior in response to benefits cliffs, and if so, what actions are they taking regarding work/earned income?
2. Which government assistance programs are these Utahns most concerned with losing? In other words, which benefits are they trying to preserve?
3. What is the level of awareness of alternatives to government assistance programs in the event of a program participant losing a given benefit?

The American Enterprise Institute hosted a discussion on child welfare priorities, where experts examined how to reform a system facing a decline in foster homes and competing priorities between family reunification and child protection. This webinar recording highlights the panelists’ conversation on the importance of distinguishing between “complex poverty”—which involves substance abuse and mental illness—and material poverty.

The Office of Family Assistance published data tables which show TANF and Separate State Programs-Maintenance of Effort (SSP-MOE) caseloads separately, as well as combined by state and at the national level from October 2023 through September 2024. The tables are cross-tabbed to include total numbers of recipients, adult recipients, child recipients, families, one-parent families, two-parent families, no parent families, and monthly caseload data.

Nearly twenty years ago, the Office of Family Assistance hosted the Faith-based and Community Organizations (FBCO) Initiative to better understand and enhance the partnerships between Federal, State, or local governments and FBCOs to provide employment and self-sufficiency services to TANF participants and other low-income populations. While this initiative has since ended, the promising work of the public sector and FBCO collaborations has not. This PeerTA webpage provides resources intended to help identify, establish, maintain, and strengthen partnerships between TANF agencies and FBCOs.