This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation report explores the importance of the relationship between self-regulation and improved economic outcomes. The report identifies the psychological insights behind self-regulation, which refers to the personality factors and skills that allow individuals to intentionally control their emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. This control enables people to set goals and solve problems. Also included is a discussion of ways to increase this internal capacity.

Massachusetts leads the way in providing social workers the resources they need to combat the opioid crisis. The Governor created a Social Work Education Working Group on Substance Misuse, which has partnered with the National Association of Social Workers and local social work graduate schools to develop a unified framework for caseworkers to manage substance abuse. This report outlines the core principles of their strategy, which will be implemented statewide in social work curriculum. The guidelines include the Primary Prevention Domain of Preventing Substance Misuse, the Secondary Prevention Domain of Caring for Individuals At-Risk for Substance Use Disorders, and the Tertiary Prevention Domain of Managing Substance Use Disorders as a Chronic Disease. Within these three realms, the working group lists subareas of focus. This outline can be used as an example for other states or practitioners looking to develop supportive and standardized curriculum for those on the front lines of the opioid epidemic.

This annual Administration for Children and Families publication is a data almanac of TANF policies in all 50 states and the District of Columbia through July 2017, contained within the Welfare Rules Database. It provides comprehensive guidance on long-term rule changes on cash assistance programs and the state policies from 1996 to 2017.

The Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE) seeks material from stakeholders on hearing quality and judicial decision-making in child welfare cases. OPRE encourages submissions of findings from related programs, research reports, tools, and local datasets, among other relevant resources. The information gathered will be used to develop the Understanding Judicial Decision-Making and Hearing Quality in Child Welfare project that will look at how hearing quality and the court decision-making process affect case planning, child well-being, and family outcomes. Materials should be emailed to cwhearingquality@acf.hhs.gov by January 31, 2019.

This interactive data dashboard, developed as a collaborative research project between the U.S. Census Bureau and researchers from Harvard University and Brown University, is a comprehensive Census tract-level dataset of children’s outcomes in adulthood using data from almost the entire U.S. population. In particular, the tract analysis estimates childhood outcomes in adulthood, to include earnings and incarceration rate, as they correlate to parents’ income, race, and gender. The outcomes can be traced to the poverty and incarceration rates occurring in the census tracts where the children grew up.

The Office of Family Assistance hosted a webinar entitled "Building Social Capital for Families on Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) and Other Low-Income Populations: The Important Role of Community-Based and Faith-Based Organizations" on Wednesday, November 28, 2018. Many efforts to stop the cycle of poverty have focused on employment as the answer, especially after the legislation of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 and the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) of 2014. However, TANF eligible families need access to forms of capital beyond economic capital to move out of poverty. These families benefit from access to trust-based networks that provide other types of resources, also known as social capital.

Community-Based Organizations (CBOs) and Faith-Based Organizations (FBOs) play a critical role in providing culturally sensitive social capital to TANF eligible families that create pathways out of poverty as they are embedded in the communities they serve. In this webinar, participants heard from FBOs and CBOs that serve TANF eligible families.

Qaadirah Abdur-Rahim from the Future Foundation and Juanita Epps from Pathways Virginia presented.

Up to 74% of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) participants report recent experiences of domestic violence, compared to 30% of the general population, according to 2013 data. Survivors are often isolated from family, friends, and financial resources as a result of a perpetrator’s tactics to maximize the survivor’s level of dependency on them and decrease the likelihood that the survivor can gain self-sufficiency. TANF and other public assistance programs have a unique opportunity to provide necessary financial assistance and access to critical resources that can help survivors and their children move toward greater independence and self-sufficiency. In recognition of Domestic Violence Awareness Month, this facilitated webinar shared key findings about the economic toll intimate partner violence takes on survivors, and strategies for best supporting survivors who are accessing public assistance programs. This webinar took place on October 31 between 1:00 and 2:30 p.m. EDT.

Due to its accountability and efficiency, Performance-Based Contracting has been identified as a topic of interest among TANF programs around the nation. This podcast was convened to provide insight about how performance-based contracting improved employment outcomes for TANF-eligible populations. Brian Anderson from the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families takes listeners on the journey Wisconsin Works took to improve employment outcomes for TANF clients and how performance-based contracting played a role.