This Quality Improvement Center for Workforce Development video highlights an Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians elder explaining historical trauma and why child welfare workers must address historical trauma to be successful in their work.

The Office of Family Assistance and Children’s Bureau’s initiative, “Families Are Stronger Together Learning Community” (FAST-LC), supported ten TANF and child welfare programs across the country as they worked to promote innovative prevention strategies to mitigate and reduce families’ involvement with the child welfare system through partnerships between TANF and Child Welfare programs. The FAST-LC Site Journeys capture and convey the participating states’ and tribes’ motivation for change, the partnership and prevention innovations they developed and implemented, and the lessons they learned from their journey experiences. This site journey features Pascua Yaqui Tribe’s FAST-LC story.

The Office of Family Assistance and Children’s Bureau’s initiative, “Families Are Stronger Together Learning Community” (FAST-LC), supported ten TANF and child welfare programs across the country as they worked to promote innovative prevention strategies to mitigate and reduce families’ involvement with the child welfare system through partnerships between TANF and Child Welfare programs. The FAST-LC Site Journeys capture and convey the participating states’ and tribes’ motivation for change, the partnership and prevention innovations they developed and implemented, and the lessons they learned from their journey experiences. This site journey features Chippewa Cree Tribe’s FAST-LC story.

This brief synthesizes the work the states and tribes participating in the Office for Family Assistance and Children’s Bureau’s joint-initiative “Families Are Stronger Together Learning Community” (FAST-LC) accomplished. It highlights implementation issues and the strategies the participating states and tribes employed in their partnership efforts and their prevention-oriented activities. The brief also identifies sustainability issues the sites confronted and addressed.

This brief describes a human-centered design approach that any state, Tribal, or local agency can use to strengthen partnerships between TANF and Child Welfare with the goal of lowering families’ risk of involvement with the Child Welfare system. It offers several example activities, including building empathy for families, mapping partners serving families, and exploring families' program experiences.

This Grandfamilies and Kinship Support Network and National Indian Child Welfare Association tipsheet was developed for service providers to share with relatives/kin caring for Native children. It provides guidance to help caregivers access services, utilize the services effectively, and advocate for Native children in their care. This resource can support families to identify and connect to services such as childcare, behavioral health, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), TANF non-needy (child-only) grants, assistance with Social Security Income and other paperwork, and much more.

On July 8, 2024, the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) announced $3 million in new awards to six tribal entities as part of the Tribal Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program, which develops and strengthens tribal capacity to support and promote the health and well-being of expectant families and families with young children in American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) communities. This ACF announcement highlights the six tribal entities, which will build new capacity to provide critical early childhood home visiting services to AIAN families and children in communities where these services do not currently exist. The new grant recipients are: Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium, Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation (Connecticut), Jicarilla Apache Nation (New Mexico), Seneca Nation of Indians (New York), Future Generations Collaborative (Oregon), and Oglala Sioux Tribe (South Dakota).

Child support programs across the country serve millions of families with low incomes. They establish paternity and child support orders, and they collect child support payments that can help increase family financial stability and contribute to positive long-term outcomes for children. However, many parents with child support obligations struggle to make regular payments. This can result in less financial support for their children, strained parenting relationships, and a potentially substantial accumulation of debt. This Building Evidence on Employment Strategies brief describes the efforts of two county child support agencies in Ohio to increase the availability of supportive services to parents who owe child support, with the goals of improving their employment outcomes, increasing their ability to meet their child support obligations, and improving their relationships with their children. This brief is a part of the BEES Project, which is studying a range of approaches to improve economic mobility and stability for families.

This Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation toolbox highlights selected resources and tools that are particularly relevant for current and future Tribal TANF-Child Welfare Coordination (TTCW) grantees, and that may also be relevant for other human services programs. Resources included address the following topic areas: developing and using logic models for systems change; planning for data collection and collecting data; collecting and using stories in program research and dissemination; collaborative approaches to screening and assessment; data sharing and protecting sensitive information; performance measurement; data-driven decision making and continuous quality improvement; measuring collaboration; measuring program outcomes; dissemination; and sustainability.