This comprehensive child welfare resource provides state and national data on child maltreatment, foster care, kinship caregiving, and adoption from foster care. Data profiles are available by state. Also available for download is a companion guide which explains how stakeholders can interpret and use the data.

Fathers have encountered challenges that may affect their romantic and coparenting relationships during the COVID-19 pandemic. These include increased unemployment, issues around child access and visitation, and difficulties navigating work-from-home arrangements. COVID-19 also created unique hurdles for fatherhood programs in providing services to fathers, and many of these programs were required to swiftly shift from in-person to virtual service delivery. This brief describes how COVID-19 affected fathers’ relationships and healthy relationship programming provided by fatherhood programs and offers strategies that these programs can adopt to better support fathers’ coparenting and romantic relationships.

Providing access to tangible resources can strengthen families and communities by avoiding and de-escalating crises, reducing parental stress, increasing access to safe housing and reliable childcare, and ensuring children have the material items they need to thrive. This brief discusses the impact of community-based strategies, connections, and collaborations that offer economic supports to address families’ basic needs, keeping children safe and families together. These include housing supports, food assistance, financial supports, employment assistance, early care and education services, legal services, and medical and behavioral health care.

Healthy marriage and relationship education (HMRE) programs for youth aim to improve young people’s understanding of romantic relationships and prepare them to have healthy romantic relationships in adolescence and adulthood. This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation brief summarizes the impact literature on these programs. The brief describes HMRE programs for youth, including the types of services they offer, how they are structured, the populations they serve, and their effectiveness.

The child welfare-to-prison pipeline describes the systems that funnel youth from the child welfare system into the juvenile justice system. The child welfare system often targets and disproportionately surveils black and brown families—largely those living in poverty and dealing with the challenges of mental health, substance use, and over-policing by the criminal legal system. The National Association of Counsel for Children (NACC) will host a webinar on March 22, 2022 from 1:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. ET. Speakers will stress the importance of strengthening community resources and preventing family disintegration as a tool to end the child welfare-to-prison pipeline. There is a registration fee for non-NACC members to attend this webinar.

The Administration for Children and Families will host a webinar on March 14, 2022 from 2:30 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. ET which will discuss approaches to supporting, growing, and strengthening the early childhood workforce in tribal communities. Tribal communities seek to ensure that early childhood program staff have the language, cultural, and community knowledge to implement culturally grounded programs that meet the needs of American Indian/Alaska Native children and families. They also have a strong interest in “growing their own” workforce by supporting members of the community, including former program participants, to become early childhood professionals. In the webinar, participants will hear an overview of issues related to supporting and strengthening the early childhood workforce in tribal communities, followed by a panel highlighting innovations and promising practices. Additionally, participants will be able to learn more about and discuss highlighted strategies with peers and hear about resources they can use in their own communities.

The Office of Family Assistance (OFA) hosted the Using the Pandemic Emergency Assistance Fund webinar on March 8 and 9, 2022. Separate sessions were held for states, tribes, and territories that administer PEAF funds. Established by the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, PEAF provides funding to states, tribes administering a TANF program, and all five U.S. territories to assist needy families impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic to use funds to provide certain non-recurrent, short term benefits.

During these webinars, OFA shared its newly developed brief, Responding to Winter Utility Needs: Using the Pandemic Emergency Assistance Fund and discussed how PEAF grantees can blend and braid PEAF allocations with other federal funds to help families with high utility costs. Current PEAF grantees also shared their PEAF experiences, and the webinar concluded with a facilitated discussion.

In this webinar, participants:

• Learned different approaches for distributing PEAF-funded cash assistance.
• Explored how COVID-19 impacted energy security for low-income families and how the Pandemic Emergency Assistance Fund can help.
• Heard from PEAF grantees who have allocated resources to help low-income families with utility assistance and other needs.

Each webinar was tailored to states, tribes, and territories administering PEAF resources.

Please note: Webinar recording for territories is unavailable. Please review the PowerPoint slides and/or watch the recording of the state webinar (see link below).

This playbook, developed in collaboration between the National Community Action Partnership and the American Public Human Services Association, explores how Community Action and human services agencies partnered together in response to the COVID-19 public health and economic crisis. It presents opportunities for alignment in providing whole family supports, making career pathways possible for SNAP recipients, and tackling structural inequities in accessing services. Examples of these alignments include western Maryland and Virginia (whole family supports), Minnesota and Oregon (SNAP Employment & Training), and rural Ohio and Montgomery County, Maryland (dismantling structural inequities).

Failing to practice self-care habits contributes to the stress caregivers feel and the problems they may experience with their own physical, mental, and emotional health. The likely outcome or consequence for a caregiver who is not taking care of him- or herself is burnout. This blogpost identifies causes of caregiver burnout, how these factors contribute to negative feelings, and how burnout can manifest itself in various ways.

This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation brief intends to help Responsible Fatherhood (RF) programs better serve fathers with criminal justice involvement by summarizing research on the effects of parenting programs for incarcerated and reentering fathers. The brief has three components:

• A description of parenting programs for incarcerated and reentering fathers, including the populations they serve and the types of services they offer,
• Highlights of what is known about the effectiveness of these programs from studies of parenting programs for incarcerated and reentering fathers, and
• A discussion of how the RF field can use this evidence to strengthen parenting services for fathers with criminal justice involvement.