The Child Welfare Community Collaborations (CWCC) initiative is designed to mobilize communities to develop and evaluate multi-system collaboratives that address local barriers and provide a continuum of services to prevent child abuse and neglect. In 2018 and 2019, the Children’s Bureau awarded 5-year cooperative agreements to a total of 13 states, non-profit organizations, and Native American tribal organizations. This Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation brief provides a high-level description of each of the 13 CWCC projects and is one of a series of products the evaluation team will produce as part of the cross-site process evaluation. This brief contains a one-page description of each project, including its geographic catchment area, population of focus, key partners, prior experience with community-level collaboration, timeline, and local evaluation.

Jurisdictions are increasingly using funding in innovative ways to meet the economic and concrete needs of families as a child welfare prevention strategy. Concrete supports are provided further upstream to families at risk for child welfare involvement. While there is variation in when and how these flexible dollars are used by child welfare agencies to strengthen families, this Chapin Hall policy brief highlights efforts in Kentucky, Indiana, and Wisconsin to integrate and expand flexible funds as a core component of their prevention continuum.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services hosted a webinar on April 23, 2024 to highlight the voices of parent leaders, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and Prevent Child Abuse America. This virtual conversation included how communities can support families to prevent adversity and promote positive experiences so kids can thrive.

WorkforceGPS is hosting a webinar on April 23, 2024 from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. ET, where participants will hear about the critical role of family engagement in the success of reentry programs for individuals returning to their communities after incarceration. By involving families in the reentry process, programs can create a supportive environment that fosters positive outcomes, such as employment, for returning individuals. Presenters will feature a representative from a reentry employment opportunity funded program, a participant from the program, a family member of the participant, and an employer.

This Mathematica resource is part of the evaluation of Promoting Opportunity Demonstration (POD), which provided modifications to Social Security Disability Insurance program rules to determine if a benefit offset formula can promote employment, reduce people’s dependence on benefits, and decrease the program’s administrative complexity. This publication is a study of how disability beneficiary work behavior responds to a rule change that replaces a cash cliff, a threshold above which benefits reduce to zero, with a benefit offset ramp. This resource provides an analysis of mechanisms indicating that administrative burden, the limited size of the incentive, and individual and systemic barriers to employment for people with disabilities likely contributed to the limited impacts.

April is National Child Abuse Prevention month. The 2024 theme is "Doing Things Differently: Moving from the Challenge to the Change,” which was designed to encourage Administration of Children and Families (ACF) partners to continue building communities that ensure families have access to fundamental supports, such as housing, food, transportation, and child care. This ACF resource highlights supporting families with a holistic perspective that recognizes the interdependence between parents and children, and offers outreach materials.

The 100% New Mexico Initiative is a community-led, data-driven approach to ensure all New Mexicans have access to vital services, including job training, transportation, and parent supports. Local communities are guided by a seven-step process to survey community members, assess results, and target evidence-informed solutions to resolve barriers to all community members accessing vital services. This Chapin Hall research brief series describes the baseline results from 6,549 local community members from 11 counties about barriers they face accessing vital services.  

This Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE) report examines the link between measures of self-regulation skills and longer-term outcomes among adults with low incomes. OPRE drew on the conceptualization of self-regulation skills from the Goal-Oriented Adult Learning in Self-Sufficiency (GOALS) project and used data from the Evaluation of Employment Coaching for TANF and Related Populations. Using both sets of data, OPRE examined the predictive power of self-regulation measures by examining their link to future outcomes such as earnings and employment one year later.

The National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center (NIWRC) is offering On-Site Technical Assistance (TA) to strengthen, develop, and/or expand the capacity of tribal and native advocacy programs and communities' responses to intimate partner violence, sexual assault, stalking, dating violence, and sex trafficking. The NIWRC staff will collaborate with each selected On-Site TA recipient to create an agenda specific to their program and tribal community. The NIWRC TA application is due April 22, 2024.