The Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE) will convene the 2024 Research and Evaluation Conference on Self-Sufficiency (RECS) in person in Washington, DC on May 29–31, 2024. RECS 2024 will focus on programs, policies, and services that support families on the path to economic self-sufficiency. Presentations will feature research findings and their policy and practice implications for an audience that includes researchers, practitioners, state and local administrators, federal officials, and policymakers. Join OPRE for a virtual information session on Thursday, June 22, 2023 from 1:00 to 2:00 p.m. ET to hear more about the conference, conference tracks, proposal types, tips for preparing a successful proposal, and how to submit a proposal through the website.

The ways poverty is measured can influence how we understand what it means to live in poverty. These measures inform the work of policymakers, practitioners, and advocates to address poverty and prevent the associated adverse consequences. This brief by Child Trends summarizes the basic attributes of the range of poverty measures, as well as their strengths and limitations. The objective is to give policy analysts and researchers the tools to interpret poverty statistics appropriately and decide when to use which measure.

Child poverty is associated with both short- and long-term health and well-being. Poverty affects child health directly through the experience of deprivation, such as through food insufficiency or lack of housing, but also indirectly through the availability of parental or community resources. Economic resources also shape children's access to health-promoting policies, like education, child care, parental leave, and health care, which affect both current and later-life health and mortality. Many income support policies also reduce poverty and improve economic well-being, which in turn improves child health. This free open access article reviews the evidence on income support policies in the United States and their effects on child health. This paper is not an exhaustive literature review but paints a broad picture of findings related to income support and child health. It also outlines policy considerations and areas where additional research is needed to understand how income support and poverty reduction might best support child health.

This report provides welfare dependence indicators through 2019 for most indicators and through 2020 for other indicators, reflecting changes that have taken place since enactment of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996. Welfare dependence is defined in this report as the proportion of individuals who receive more than half of their total family income in one year from the TANF program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and/or the Supplemental Security Income program.

State and local benefits agency staff are invited to join a training with Kristi Thornton of the Federal Communications Commission on May 26, 2023 at 1:00 p.m. ET to learn about relevant law concerning SMS messaging to engage with public benefits applicants and recipients. This training will describe a declaratory ruling issued by an FCC Bureau in January 2023, and other guidance public benefits programs should consider (including non-health and integrated delivery models).

After registering, registrants will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

OFA needs your help! We want to talk to you! We’re hoping to speak with states, counties, and tribal TANF agencies that have made a concentrated effort to have case managers/coaches complete the TANF coaching e-learning modules. The purpose of these discussions is to learn more about your approach to case management and coaching, how you implemented the modules, and how things have gone since then (what has gone well, or areas for change and growth). Information from the discussions will be used to develop an issue brief that we will publish to share what you learned with your peers nationally. Moreover, your feedback will help inform potential revisions to the tools.

Please contact Megan Rymski with Public Consulting Group (PCG), our contractor for this work, if you are interested in participating. She can be reached at mrymski@pcgus.com.

Sponsored by the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE), the Family Input Study seeks to 1) understand how TANF, child support, and other human services programs gather and use family input for program improvement; 2) identify ways for TANF and child support programs to incorporate family input for program improvement; and 3) identify the successes and challenges these programs face in gathering and using family input. To support programs in planning for and engaging families in program improvement, the Family Input Study has developed a toolkit of resources, guides, and tools for TANF and child support program administrators and practitioners.

The Study is seeking TANF and child support programs run by states, tribes, territories, and counties to pilot test the toolkit. During the 12-month pilot test period, participating programs will lead a program improvement effort using the Family Input Resources toolkit and input from the families they serve to guide their effort.

If interested in participating in this pilot test opportunity, please complete the expression of interest form by May 12, 2023.

Accompanying this request are two one-pagers. The first document is a set of FAQs which identifies the expectations and benefits of participating in the Family Input Study. The second document is background information about the Family Input Study.

For questions, please contact the study team lead (Jeanette Holdbrook at jholdbrook@mathematica-mpr.com) or the OPRE project officer (Lisa Zingman at lisa.zingman@acf.gov).

Employment retention services interventions offer a combination of services intended to help maintain employment and promote career advancement among people, often those with low incomes, who already have a job. This Pathways to Work Evidence Clearinghouse Evidence Snapshot summarizes what rigorous research tells us about nine interventions that used employment retention services as their primary service and the interventions’ impacts on earnings, employment, the receipt of public benefits, and education and training. The Evidence Snapshot helps TANF administrators, policymakers, researchers, and the general public apply this evidence to contexts and questions that matter to them.