Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, families endured constant and increased levels of stressors, such as job loss, illness, lack of social support, and inadequate childcare. Often, families are reported to child protection hotlines not because their children are at imminent risk of harm, but rather because of poverty-related issues such as a family’s lack of access to safe housing and other community services that support raising a child. These types of referrals to child protective services may result in an over-surveillance of families, which can compound the stresses inside the home. This report examines how hotline data are collected, analyzed, and used to put greater focus on identifying and addressing community-level causes of family stress and instability, rather than focusing primarily on child- and family-level factors.

The Child Welfare Information Gateway created a five-part podcast series that illustrated ways that states and tribal jurisdictions have supported kinship caregivers. Part 1 of this series featured a group of kinship-centered services and programs from the Rhode Island Department of Children, Youth, and Families. Topics discussed included:

• Why kinship caregivers should be treated differently by agencies and caseworkers, and the specific challenges kinship caregivers face,
• Strengthening relationships between caseworkers and kinship caregivers,
• The roles and responsibilities of the Rhode Island’s Family Search and Engagement team, and
• Adapting a customer-service approach across the State’s Department of Children, Youth, and Families, and what it means for caseworkers to “manage emotions first.”

The U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration, Office of Workforce Investment held a webinar on August 11, 2022 to support the workforce system’s understanding of the complex issues around substance use disorder and help them reach and assist individuals and businesses impacted by opioid addiction. Guest speakers from the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services shared an overview of "Strategies for Serving Individuals Impacted by Opioid Use Disorder: A Toolkit for Ohio’s Public Workforce System." The Toolkit is designed to guide and support Workforce Boards and workforce development professionals as they implement policies, processes, and services. It is built around the following key pillars of success: Strong Local Partnerships; Holistic Care Management; Steps to Success; Recovery-Friendly Workplaces; and Knowledgeable Staff. Transcripts of the webinar and the Toolkit are available for downloading.

Supporting healthy development begins in early childhood. To support their children and optimize family well-being, parents need access to high-quality early care and education (ECE) services, as well as support for broader family needs, such as nutrition, home visiting, parenting skills, or employment. ACF sponsored the Assessing Models of Coordinated Services (AMCS) study to deepen understanding of programs, groups, agencies, or organizations that coordinate ECE with other health and human services (referred to in this report as coordinated services approaches). This report describes the study’s qualitative data collection, presents models of coordinated services at the state and local level, and reports findings about state and local coordinated services approaches.

The Administration for Children and Families (ACF) has published several resources under Project SPARK and Project IMPROVE. Both projects — conducted in close coordination by the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE) and the Office of Family Assistance (OFA), respectively — supported 17 research-practice partnerships to help TANF agencies design and implement evidence-informed program changes.

These available publications include the Learn, Innovate, Improve (LI2) practice guide, which outlines LI2, a program improvement approach used by many TANF and human services agencies under Projects SPARK and IMPROVE. Briefs that document the implementation of LI2 feature the Iowa Department of Human Rights (assessing a virtual home visiting program), the New York City Human Resources Administration (redesigning an intake assessment for families receiving cash assistance), and the Baltimore City Health Department (designing and implementing a transitional jobs program).

Also available are briefs on innovative approaches to technology and participant engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic and how to support mental wellness for staff and participants, as well as a podcast about how the pandemic prompted human services agencies to rethink their internal and external operations.

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the way many human services agencies operated. The stress, trauma, and grief caused by the pandemic prompted agencies to rethink how they engaged with and supported their clients. It also forced agencies to experiment with new approaches to address persistent stress and trauma experienced by their own staff. This Mathematica podcast brings together research experts and leaders of human services programs to discuss trends that have emerged in human services agencies during the pandemic.

Since the establishment of the Child Support Enforcement Program in 1975, child support policy has played a central role in improving the economic circumstances of children living apart from one of their parents. Prior research has documented the policy’s positive effects on family economic wellbeing at the time of receipt. But little work has examined the effects of child support receipt as a child on economic outcomes in adulthood. This report uses analytic approaches to test whether adults who received support as children have higher earnings, are more likely to be employed, have lower public program participation, receive less in public benefits, and are less likely to have an open child support case than those who did not receive child support or received very little.

This article discusses how partners within the County of San Diego formed two programs, Developmental Screening & Enhancement Program (DSEP) and KidSTART, aimed at ensuring that children in foster care 5 years old or younger receive needed services to maintain placement stability, achieve timely permanency, and reach their full potential. Both programs operate under Rady Children’s Hospital San Diego. DSEP provides developmental and behavior screening and service linkages for all young children involved with the County of San Diego’s Child Welfare Services (CWS), while KidSTART provides comprehensive services to young children with complex needs, regardless of system involvement.

The Strengthening the Implementation of Responsible Fatherhood Programs (SIRF) project uses rapid learning cycles in an effort to improve the enrollment, engagement, and retention of fathers in nine current federal Fatherhood Family-focused, Interconnected, Resilient, and Essential (FIRE) grantees and one former recipient of a federal fatherhood grant. This brief illustrates how SIRF and program teams used a human-centered design technique called customer journey mapping, a collaborative process that puts the needs and goals of participants at the center of efforts to design or improve a product or service. Mapping helped both the program and SIRF teams to better understand fathers’ program experiences and perspectives, and to identify where program processes might be restructured to increase fathers’ participation.

This brief describes the experiences of nine families with low incomes and their children during the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic, from March through September 2020. The research was conducted by interviews with 9 adults from three major U.S. cities in September 2020. Its key findings were that families experienced a sense of uncertainty and constant, unpredictable change in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. Further, as the pandemic evolved, the multiple life fluctuations it caused significantly affected their economic circumstances and emotional well-being.