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.

In recent years, many healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) programs serving couples with low incomes have offered participants economic stability services in addition to traditional HMRE programming focused on relationship skills. The Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services (STREAMS) evaluation included an impact study of Empowering Families, an HMRE program with integrated economic stability services for couples with low incomes raising children together. The program was implemented by The Parenting Center, a community-based social services provider in Fort Worth, Texas. Empowering Families’ core service was an eight-session workshop that taught relationship skills integrated with content on employment and financial literacy. The program supplemented this workshop with one-on-one employment counseling and financial coaching services.

The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Data Innovation project and the TANF Data Collaborative (TDC) Pilot were established to expand the routine use, integration, and analysis of TANF and employment data by agency staff to improve program services and outcomes for families with low incomes. The 30-month TDC Pilot offered technical assistance and training to support cross-disciplinary teams of staff at eight state and county TANF programs. This nine-minute video, produced after the completion of the TDC Pilot, features staff members from the California, Colorado, Minnesota, and Virginia TANF agencies reflecting on their challenges, accomplishments, and general experiences during the pilot. Staff describe their research questions and discuss building data capacity, integrating datasets, networking with other states, increasing collaboration between state and county agencies, learning new technical skills, and the benefits of being able to draw from diverse skillsets.

This brief presents six considerations for practitioners who want to try using text message reminders to increase participation at the first session of a voluntary program and regular attendance thereafter. The considerations are drawn from a recent study assessing the effectiveness of text message reminders in promoting couples’ attendance at a voluntary healthy marriage and relationship education workshop in Florida. The study was conducted as part of the Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services evaluation for the Administration for Children and Families.

January is National Mentoring Month—an opportunity to recognize the dedicated mentors whose wisdom, guidance, and positive examples set new workers on a path to success, and to affirm the value of mentorship in the career trajectory of jobs-seekers and workers in our communities. This set of resources provides background information where one can learn more about mentoring and mentoring opportunities.

The Health Profession Opportunity Grants (HPOG) program offers education, training, support services, and employment assistance to prepare Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) recipients and other adults with low incomes for occupations in the healthcare field that pay well and are expected to either experience labor shortages or be in high demand. This HPOG 2.0 National Evaluation Implementation Study Report documents how 27 non-tribal HPOG 2.0 grantees designed and implemented their programs, including program contexts, administration, grant expenditures, training and support services, and employment assistance services. It also documents participant characteristics and their engagement in program services and training activities.

The vastly altered societal context since March 2020 has created an opportunity for responsible fatherhood programs to partner with systems such as child welfare, child support, criminal justice, public assistance, workforce development, and others in innovative ways that could lead to program sustainability that the fatherhood field has not seen before. In this National Responsible Fatherhood Clearinghouse information brief, Dr. Andrew Freeberg, Director of Family Stability for Goodwill-Easter Seals Minnesota, draws on his 20 years of experience overseeing the organization’s FATHER Project to provide a case study of leadership, innovation, and sustainability. In the brief, he also shares strategies that other leaders of fatherhood programs might employ.

This brief explores how guaranteed income might address gaps and deficits in policies designed to address America’s housing affordability crisis. Less well documented in the research are the supplementary and comparative advantages of cash infusion vis-à-vis programs restricted to meeting basic needs, such as housing, food, and child care. This analysis of guaranteed income as a strategy to combat the affordable housing crisis cites secondary data from past experiments as well as current demonstrations that have released evaluation data. In addition to using secondary data, interviews were conducted with key stakeholders from three recent municipal guaranteed income pilots in Arlington, Virginia; Austin, Texas; and Chicago, Illinois.