The Office of Human Services Policy at the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation will host a virtual training series and offer concrete strategies for organizations working with incarcerated/reentering participants to help them improve their outcomes through building and leveraging social capital. The series will also describe considerations for measuring social capital. The first of these virtual training sessions will be held on August 4, 2020 from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. ET. Subsequent sessions will be held bi-weekly on Tuesdays during the same time slot.

This dataset from the Annie E. Casey Foundation is the 31st edition that follows and ranks states on metrics related to child well-being. The data reflects trends prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Particular focus is on four larger categories of trend analysis: economic well-being, education, family and community, and health. Additionally, there are individual state profiles with relevant data that are presented as user-friendly fact sheets.

This issue brief identifies characteristics of noncustodial parents in the Procedural Justice-Informed Alternatives to Contempt (PJAC) demonstration project in six child support agencies across the country. The brief also includes assessments from case managers who use these characteristics to determine the reasons why they believe these noncustodial parents fall into contempt of court orders. The brief findings are drawn from PJAC records for noncustodial parents enrolled through July 31, 2019 and from interviews with case managers conducted during the spring of 2019.

Stimulus checks, enhanced SNAP, and expanded unemployment insurance benefits enacted by the Federal government provided financial assistance to low-income individuals and families impacted by COVID-19 and lessened the rise of the poverty rate. This report includes individual state projected 2020 annual poverty rates with and without COVID-19 pandemic response policies. The report indicates that the policies implemented in the early months of the crisis will keep more than 10 million people out of poverty this year. These are initial projections based on current data, and the official data on poverty rates for 2020 will not be available until September 2021. This information is intended to help policymakers address the continuing hardships that families are facing and to initiate and implement policies that will support families and avoid rising poverty rates.

Modern digital technology, coupled with user-friendly and human-centered design and application, positively impacts delivery of critical and essential social supports to low-income families especially during COVID-19. This blog post details how the private sector has responded to the COVID crisis with technological solutions to help Federal, state, and local governments meet the needs of their most vulnerable populations. Nonprofit organizations have designed and made available to public-serving institutions technology to help low-income families access SNAP assistance, WIC supplements, energy saving programs, TANF funds, and other public safety benefits. While these tech-enabled processes and associated IT systems have streamlined the delivery process, there are still flaws in the existing system and gaps in the delivery mechanisms associated with accessing safety net programs that complicate access.

This Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation tool supports Tribal TANF-Child Welfare Coordination grantees and human service partners as they identify and operationalize collaboration approaches and monitor the effectiveness of these approaches. There is also guidance on how to measure and track progress on coordination among partners. The tool includes details on options for completing, scoring, and interpreting Collaboration Assessment Tool results; the entire assessment tool is included in an appendix and as a separate downloadable Excel file.

This issue brief analyzes characteristics of the early care and education (ECE) workforce in Arkansas and identifies research on the correlation between high-quality ECE and child development, as well as ECE providers’ emotional well-being. The brief focuses on variance of the ECE workforce by region or in terms of rural versus urban relative to teachers’ and caregivers’ self-reports of well-being, economic pressures, and education levels. Also highlighted are the factors that stakeholders identify as contributing to the variation of these characteristics across the state.

Access to quality maternal and child health care services remains a challenge for low-income women in many areas of the country. In this webinar scheduled for July 22, 2020 from 12 noon to 1:00 p.m. ET, a panel of health experts will discuss improving care for mothers and babies through the formation of state or multistate collaborative initiatives, hospital-based quality improvement efforts which support optimal infant nutrition, and the formation of strategic alliances with the private health sector to strengthen the quality of neonatal and child health services. Speakers include representatives of the Health Resources & Services Administration, the Carolina Global Breastfeeding Institute, and Abt Associates.

The Office of Family Assistance hosted a free webinar on understanding how to assess and build executive functioning skills in TANF participants. Executive function and self-regulation skills are the mental processes that enable us to plan, focus attention, remember instructions, and juggle multiple tasks successfully. Trouble with executive function can make it hard for individuals to navigate life, including obtaining and retaining employment. TANF case managers with an understanding of executive functioning can better support TANF participants on their pathway to self-sufficiency.

A panel of practitioners and researchers outlined the key principles of executive functioning, provided their perspectives on training caseworkers on executive functioning, and discussed how they are building executive functioning skills in TANF participants. Speakers included Dorothy Hall, Utah Department of Workforce Services; Melanie d'Almada Remedios, Washington State Regional WorkFirst Coordinator; Jessie Hancox, Colorado Works Program Administrator; and Kristen Joyce, Mathematica. They were joined by Jessica R. Kendall and Joe Raymond of ICF.
A video recording is available for viewing.

This fact sheet analyzes real-time data when examining the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on working families and draws from surveys with hourly service workers across the retail, food service, hospitality, house cleaning, delivery, and home health care industries. The fact sheet notes reductions in work hours and income, job loss, and overall family well-being due to COVID and stresses the importance of employers and government working to meet families’ needs.