Adolescence is an ideal time to help youth develop healthy relationship skills that support their lifelong health and well-being. Healthy relationship skills, such as the ability to communicate and collaborate with others and manage conflict, have shown to promote social and emotional health, including perceptions of self-worth, goal achievement, and success in the workplace. This Child Trends brief describes the potential benefits of integrating Positive Youth Development, a developmental framework that focuses on youth’s assets and strengths, into healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) programming to inform the work of HMRE program directors and administrators, as well as the efforts of educators, employers, and a range of youth-serving staff.

This Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services webpage highlights faith and community partnerships, including services ranging from faith-focused counseling, family programming, faith-based programming, and more.

Ron Desantis’ Faith and Community Initiative was launched in August 2019 to support those on the front lines of serving Floridians. The resources highlighted on their webpage aid faith institutions and community organizations with tools to support and enhance their work to serve their community.

This American Enterprise Institute report emphasizes how Governors are leveraging the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act and other policies to design, fund, and implement workforce development strategies in an evolving economic landscape.

This Jobs for the Future resource highlights Unlocked Labs, which is a program that offers technological education in corrections facilities and creates pathways to quality jobs for people who are incarcerated. To highlight the beneficial impacts these programs can have, three members of the Unlocked Labs team share their stories of how training and employment experience catalyzed their professional journeys from incarceration to well-paid quality jobs.

In this Defending Ideas podcast episode, the Alliance for Opportunity talks with Sutherland Institute to give an overview of some of the proposals currently in Congress through the lens of potential reforms to federal welfare programs. They discuss whether it is possible to save taxpayer dollars while improving outcomes for families who truly need help getting back on their feet.

There are impoverished families who are discouraged from pursuing upward mobility through work, reacting to what they perceive as perverse incentives woven into the government safety net – or “benefit cliffs.” This Sutherland Institute report evaluates the economic decision-making of safety net participants based on their understanding of the programs they use. The report answers these questions: 

1. Are Utahns who participate in government assistance programs changing their economic behavior in response to benefits cliffs, and if so, what actions are they taking regarding work/earned income?
2. Which government assistance programs are these Utahns most concerned with losing? In other words, which benefits are they trying to preserve?
3. What is the level of awareness of alternatives to government assistance programs in the event of a program participant losing a given benefit?

The American Enterprise Institute hosted a discussion on child welfare priorities, where experts examined how to reform a system facing a decline in foster homes and competing priorities between family reunification and child protection. This webinar recording highlights the panelists’ conversation on the importance of distinguishing between “complex poverty”—which involves substance abuse and mental illness—and material poverty.

Over the past ten years, only a few states have invested TANF and TANF-related funds on healthy marriage and relationship-related services. This National Healthy Marriage Resource Center fact sheet outlines how TANF funds can be used to fund programs that develop and maintain healthy marriages/families. The fact sheet highlights economic and physical data that supports this public policy initiative and justifies the investment of public funds in healthy marriage activities.

Research shows that parents and children tend to fare better on a range of outcomes when they live in low-conflict, two-parent families. Recognizing the potential benefits of healthy relationships for low-income families, Congress has funded several rounds of grants for Healthy Marriage (HM) programs since 2006. These grants aim to promote the well-being and long-term success of children and families by fostering parents’ relationship stability and economic well-being. This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation brief presents the impacts of HM programs about one year after study enrollment on: 

• the status and quality of the couples’ relationships;
• the co-parenting relationships; and
• job and career advancement.