On February 1, 2023, The Administration for Children and Families’ Office of Community Services (OCS) observed National Energy Assistance Day, which focused on reaching potential beneficiaries for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP). In support of this observance, OCS released the LIHEAP Heating Season Toolkit. This toolkit contains outreach materials including an animated video about LIHEAP heating services, outreach flyers, a fact sheet on safe and unsafe heating practices, and a social media toolkit, all intended to help LIHEAP grant recipients, stakeholders, and partners ensure that available LIHEAP funding reaches households that need assistance with their heating costs this winter.

New America and Bloomberg teamed up five years ago to launch the Shift Commission on Work, Workers, and Technology, which engaged more than 100 leaders in business, technology, policy, and academia and surveyed over a thousand Americans to study and anticipate what the future of work in America would look like. The Shift Commission published a report that outlined four core scenarios that could play out in the next 10 to 20 years, each reflecting whether there will be more or less work and whether work will exist in the form of jobs or fragmented into "tasks." To mark the Shift Commission’s five-year anniversary, New America’s Center on Education and Labor and Bloomberg will host a webinar on February 21, 2023 from 12:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. ET which will include a reflective conversation with Shift Commissioners and other thought leaders about what the Commission got right, what it got wrong, and how the future of work can be shaped for the better.

The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Data Collaborative Pilot Initiative is a component of the TANF Data Innovation project. The 30-month pilot offered technical assistance and training to support cross-disciplinary teams of staff at eight state and county TANF programs in the routine use of TANF and other administrative data to inform policy and practice. This collection of eight profiles summarizes the data analytics projects undertaken by teams from California, Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Utah, and Virginia. Each profile provides project-specific details for each pilot, including the research questions, data landscape, approach and research methods, and initial findings and next steps as well as an overview of the state TANF program.

Over 3.2 million North Carolinians are poor or near poor, and many more experience economic instability and challenges over time. This report examines the ways that women in North Carolina are caught in the crosshairs of irreconcilable social and economic demands. Hundreds of thousands of women were forced last year to forgo job opportunities, experienced employment disruptions, or lost a job because of lack of affordable childcare.

Building on previous work developing a roadmap for system-level change to better support young families, the American Public Human Services Association established the System Alignment for Young Families Learning Academy (SAYF) to support cross-systems teams from state and local human services agencies in establishing a System Alignment Plan to support young families. This blogpost notes how the SAYF Learning Academy was launched in March 2022 with six cross-sectional teams that included parent leadership representing Maryland, Maricopa County (Arizona), Massachusetts, Nebraska, Nevada, and Wake County (North Carolina). Through the development of targeted practice tools, peer-to-peer learning, and individualized planning, the teams worked to advance system alignment, so that young families experience seamless service delivery that meets their individual needs. An infographic in the blogpost spotlights each team’s vision statement.

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act passed in 1996 replaced the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. TANF imposed work requirements on participants who received benefits for a certain period of time and time limits on benefits that were paid with federal funds. Some evaluations conducted at that time, including the National Evaluation of Welfare-to-Work Strategies (NEWWS), found these new approaches led to some positive short-term effects for participants. This report is part of the From Theory to Practice project and presents findings from an analysis of 20-year outcomes and impacts of an employment-focused program offered to welfare recipients in Portland, Oregon in the 1990s as part of NEWWS. The findings described in the report represent some of the first available evidence on how individuals who previously received welfare fared in the labor market over the long term and on how sequence and cluster analyses can provide a richer picture of their trajectories and program impacts.

The economic and health effects of COVID-19 continue to linger for low- and moderate-income communities and communities of color, and organizations serving these communities also continue to feel the strain of COVID-19. While there were lower levels of pandemic-related effects in many segments of the economy relative to 2021 and there are signs of slow stabilization and recovery, to promote a true recovery that benefits these communities, it is important to monitor the conditions and needs of the organizations who serve those affected most.

As part of its Connecting Communities webinar series, the Federal Reserve System will host a discussion on February 9, 2023 from 3:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. ET on findings from the National COVID-19 Community Impact Survey administered by the Federal Reserve System. The survey tracks the significant impact that the pandemic has had on underserved communities and those who support them. Participants will hear perspectives from those working on the frontlines in distressed communities and how organizations can use this data to advocate for themselves and those that they serve.

Strengthening Families and Help Me Grow (HMG) are closely aligned efforts focused on improving outcomes in early childhood. This brief describes how the HMG Model currently aligns with the Strengthening Families Approach and Protective Factors Framework and how HMG affiliates are currently using Strengthening Families. The brief also illustrates how the introduction of goal concordant care might enhance HMG affiliates’ ability to support families in attaining their goals for their children, as well as how this interacts with the promotion of families’ protective factors.

Families affected by substance use disorders and involved in the child welfare system face a variety of complex challenges. Children of parents with substance use disorder are more likely to be removed from parental care, less likely to be reunified, and experience lengthier out-of-home placements and delayed permanency. This brief provides an overview of the Sobriety Treatment and Recovery Teams (START) program — an evidence-based child welfare service delivery model for families that is aimed at keeping children safely with their parent(s) whenever possible through achieving parental sobriety and recovery, and family stability. The brief also highlights the funding and implementation of the START model in Kansas, Kentucky (which uses TANF to support the model), North Carolina, and Ohio, along with each state’s unique considerations.

The COVID-19 pandemic has been especially challenging for American families with children. The U.S. Surgeon General as well as the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the Children’s Hospital Association declared a children’s mental health crisis in late 2021, citing school closures, social isolation, grief over lost community and family members, and challenges accessing needed care as contributing factors. Parents, and especially mothers, have also borne significant caregiving, health, and health care access burdens that likely contributed to observed increases in mental health challenges since the pandemic began. However, women and mothers were already facing significant mental health challenges before the pandemic, and those challenges are likely to persist and evolve as the most acute pandemic stressors subside and new threats to women’s health and well-being arise. This report notes how maternal mental health has important implications for children, and how understanding mental health challenges among mothers will be critical to addressing the mental health crisis among children.