In a post from Sylvia Burwell, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, she describes a woman who experienced homelessness and was cared for by a community health center. Secretary Burwell notes the interagency commitment to end veteran homelessness by 2015, chronic homelessness by 2017, and family, youth, and child homelessness by 2020.

This blog post was written by an employee at the Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) and describes her childhood experience with child support. She highlights the work of OCSE, including their recent Child Support Report newsletter, and how the agency has improved exponentially throughout the past decades.

In the latest issue of the Office of Child Support Enforcement's Child Support Report, practitioners can learn about programs and initiatives that help fathers deepen their financial and emotional commitments to their children. Topics include temporary custody, the Responsible Fatherhood Toolkit, Medicaid, collaborative partnerships, and more.

Youth transitioning out of foster care and into adulthood need various supports to navigate the challenges they face. Recently, federal child welfare policy has significantly increased the availability of these supports. In 1999, the Foster Care Independence Act amended Title IV-E of the Social Security Act to create the Chafee Foster Care Independence Program. This amendment increased funds available to states for independent living services including training in daily living skills, education and employment assistance, counseling, and case management. Although these funds can be spent on a wide range of services and supports, much of the funding is being spent on services aimed at promoting educational attainment, which has become increasingly essential to economic self-sufficiency and better lifelong outcomes.

In addition to promoting the economic and social well being of their clients, the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) takes on many health initiatives to supplement and support their mission of helping children and families across the country. This blog post highlights some of the various health-related initiatives from ACF, some of which focus on preventing abuse, ending teen pregnancy, tribal home visiting, and combating childhood obesity.

This joint report from CLASP and the Center for American Progress explores the benefits of the federal Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) programs. Twenty state grantees and two tribal grantees were interviewed about their home visiting programs. The report includes information about how states are using MIECHV funding to expand evidence-based home visiting services to more families, build home visiting systems and connections to other services, and promote evidence-based policy, continuous quality improvement (CQI), and evaluation to ensure program success and positive results for the participants.

This guide from the Children’s Bureau was created primarily to support community-based child abuse prevention professionals who work to prevent child maltreatment and promote well-being. The guide focuses on protective factors that build family strengths and promote optimal child and youth development.

This blog post kicked off National Teen Pregnancy Prevention Month. Although the pregnancy rate among U.S. teens has decreased by more than half since 1990, disparities remain. Some youth, including those in the juvenile justice and child welfare systems, are at a much higher risk of experiencing a pregnancy than are their peers. This post highlights the need to tailor teen pregnancy prevention programs to different populations. Some approaches include empowering youth and staff, creating continuity, and testing strategies to see what works.

In this paper, the authors characterize the effects of neighborhoods on children’s earnings and other outcomes in adulthood by studying more than five million families who move across counties in the United States. The analysis includes quasi-experimental evidence that neighborhoods affect intergenerational mobility through childhood exposure effects.

The Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment provided housing vouchers to randomly selected families living in high-poverty housing projects. The vouchers allowed families to move to lower-poverty neighborhoods. Using administrative data from tax returns, the authors of this report present new evidence on the impacts of MTO on children’s long-term outcomes. They find that moving to a lower-poverty neighborhood significantly improves college attendance rates and earnings for children who were younger than 13 years of age at the time of moving. Children also live in better neighborhoods as adults and are less likely to become single parents.