According to a report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in 2014, 48.1 million people lived in food-insecure households. Food insecurity is defined as having limited access to food because of lack of money or other resources. Food insecure households are more likely to have children, be headed by a single mother, and live below 130 percent of the poverty threshold. This brief spotlight focuses on food insecurity and the importance of food assistance programs for family well-being.

The National Initiative on Mixed-Income Communities at Case Western Reserve University published this “State of the Field Scan” that explores how a mixed-income housing approach has transformed deteriorating public housing complexes into safer and more attractive developments for residents from a range of income levels. The report describes how mixed-income developments provide services to improve well-being and self-sufficiency. The authors conducted an online survey with representatives from 60 mixed-income housing developments to gather information on the demographics of the community as well as data on the types of supportive services provided, how developments tracked service use, and the developments' perceived outcomes of services provided.

U.S. families living in poverty who survive without either income from a job or from government-sponsored cash assistance are sometimes referred to as “disconnected.” This research brief from Child Trends uses data from the 2011-2012 National Survey of Children’s Health to quantify the population of children living in disconnected families in each state and to describe the extent to which families access other forms of public assistance. Some findings include: 30 percent of all children lived in disconnected families in 2011-2012; the majority of children in disconnected families lived in a household where someone received some form of public assistance, such as Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program; and the amount of children in disconnected families varied widely by State.

In this interactive feature from the Center on the Developing Child, users will learn how the choices our government and service-providers make can help children and their communities as a whole become more resilient in the face of significant challenges.

This Information Memorandum (IM) encourages TANF and child welfare agencies to coordinate and share data on the children, youth, and families they both serve. It reminds TANF programs that they are permitted under federal law to determine their own confidentiality rules and recommends cross-training and information sharing across TANF and child welfare to maximize resources and services, and help families meet the requirements of both programs.

The Office of Community Services (OCS), Division of Energy Assistance (DEA) recently announced over $3 billion of Fiscal Year (FY) 2016 block grant funding to Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) grantees. This Dear Colleague letter includes tables that present State and Tribal funding amounts.

Child support is a critical source of income, especially for the growing population of children born to unmarried mothers. Given many single mothers’ limited earnings potential, child support from non-custodial fathers is also important. This paper uses data from a statewide randomized experiment conducted in Wisconsin in order to address the effects of child support on custodial mothers’ labor supply, and whether policies that increase child support receipt will discourage mothers’ employment. The evidence indicated that there is no negative effect of child support on the likelihood to work for pay or the number of hours worked in a given week. These results suggest that custodial mothers’ child support collections and their labor supply may be compatible and that the absence of a negative labor supply effect strengthens the potential antipoverty effectiveness of child support.

This fact sheet from the Annie E. Casey Foundation presents data from the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM). The SPM measures the impact of various social programs, including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), as well as accounts for the rising costs and other changes that affect a family’s budget.

A recent release from the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP) analyzed their newly updated 50-State Policy Tracker, an interactive online tool for comparing safety net policies critical to the economic security of working families. It reveals significant disparities between different states, demonstrating that a person’s state of residence can greatly impact his or her future success. This tool includes data by state among ten critical social programs: child care subsidies, child and dependent care tax credit, Earned Income Tax Credit, family and medical leave, income tax policy, Medicaid/Children’s Health Insurance Program, minimum wage, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and unemployment insurance.