Homes for Families, Inc. developed this guide to help service providers, policymakers, community leaders, state agencies, and other stakeholders conduct comprehensive assessments of homeless families. The guide defines assessment, describes the importance of a two-generation model, and presents implications for policy and practice.

This post from the Urban Institute discusses shortfalls of the TANF program and offers suggestions to make the program more successful and more effective for low-income families. The author describes how TANF policies can create disincentives and barriers to meeting the complex needs of TANF families. Rather, she suggests, federal performance measures should give states incentives to take a balanced approach to promote work, family economic stability, and child well-being. Additionally, states should have greater flexibility through reduced reporting requirements and fewer restrictions on specific client activities.

Child welfare practitioners require effective tools to gauge children’s immediate safety and risk of future maltreatment. This brief from the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation provides information about child safety and risk assessments in AI/AN communities. It also explores the importance of cultural competency in assessments and provides examples of tribes’ adaptations of assessments to fit their communities.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation commissioned this independent evaluation to examine the effectiveness of mentoring programs. With a focus on seven mentoring programs in Washington State, the study assessed how benefits accrued by youth varied according to individual and environmental risk. “Individual risks” include behavioral challenges, social and academic functioning, and health; while “environmental risks” include challenges in the youth’s surrounding environment, such as poverty or living in a dangerous neighborhood. The findings indicated that mentored youth experienced fewer depressive symptoms, greater acceptance by their peers, more positive beliefs about their ability to succeed in school, and better grades in school. Although a 13-month follow-up survey showed that almost half of the youth had experienced at least one match closure, it also indicated that mentors faced different types of challenges based on their mentee youth’s risk profile. The authors identified a number of implications for practitioners and funders: 1) Training and support for matches should be tailored to the types and levels of risk experienced by youth. 2) Mentoring should be broadly available, as youth with varying levels and types of risk appear to derive important benefits. 3) Greater emphasis should be placed on the mental health needs of youth and the benefits that mentoring can provide in this area. 4) Efforts should continue to improve the strength and consistency of the benefits that youth derive from mentoring programs.

Early childhood experiences form the foundation of brain architecture and can have lasting positive or negative impacts on learning, behavior, and health. Today’s best programs and practices can help support child development, but many children are still left behind. This report from the Center on the Developing Child considers lessons learned from five decades of program evaluation research, identifies five core principles to inform policymaking and program development, and discusses the importance of investing in research and development to better the lives of America’s children. The core principles identified include building caregiver skills; matching interventions to sources of significant stress; and supporting the health of the mother and child before, during, and after pregnancy.

Under Federal law, able-bodied adults without dependents (ABAWDs) may only receive SNAP benefits for 3 months in a three-year period unless they meet work or training requirements. Until recently, almost every State had chosen to use a temporary waiver of the three-month time limit because of high unemployment or lack of sufficient jobs. However, many of these waivers expired at the end of 2015 due to an improving economy and ABAWDs in most States are now subject to the time limit. This brief from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service highlights the potential—and limits— of the SNAP Employment & Training (E&T) in responding to the needs of ABAWDs. The most promising role for SNAP E&T may be to offer job-driven education and training services that can open a path for ABAWDs to transition from the program the right way: by becoming self-sufficient through better paying jobs.

This report from the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation presents key findings from the evaluation of the first round of the Tribal HPOG Program. All five of the Tribal HPOG grantees implemented programs that led to healthcare training completion and employment. The report includes information on program structures, processes, and outcomes, as well as implications of these findings.

Since 2006, the Arkansas Career Pathways Initiative has used TANF funds to help eligible parents attend community and technical colleges across the state for education and training to prepare them for well-paying jobs in high-demand industries. This evaluation report from College Count$ details findings showing that over half of participating parents graduated college with an associate degree or technical certificate, which is more than twice the rate of their peers across Arkansas. Additionally, the study suggests that students enrolled in 2011 earned more than $3,000 annually in their first year after degree completion than their TANF counterparts in similar types of jobs.

Digital badges (credentials that can be shared online to document attainment of skills and completion of training or education courses) may be a resource to help both employers who report difficulty identifying qualified entry-level candidates and low-income youth or youth of color who face challenges in the labor market, including discrimination, disconnection from school and work, and difficult-to-navigate credentialing options. Digital badges offer a potential solution for employers and job-seeking youth by better communicating the skills that youth have attained so that employers can more easily see a match with qualities they value. This report from the Urban Institute presents lessons for digital badging from the perspective of workforce development research and identifies opportunities for the use of these badges to support youth workforce outcomes.

Homeless families struggle with a variety of structural and psychosocial issues, including severe poverty, unemployment, and exposure to interpersonal violence and trauma. Historically, the full range of homeless families’ needs has not been routinely assessed. The Assessment Checklist for Homeless Family Providers was created by the Bassuk Center to address this situation and assist service providers in conducting comprehensive, evidence-based assessments of the families they serve. The checklist covers the following eight domains that have been proven to be relevant to the care of homeless families: family demographics, immediate safety needs, housing and homelessness, self-sufficiency, service use, parent functioning, child development, and use of standardized screening instruments.