People facing economic instability often need more than one program or service. This might be particularly true for participants in certain programs—for example, families receiving TANF benefits might be more likely to face food insecurity given other circumstances in their lives. Even when participating in a single program, a small earnings increase can cause a loss of benefits. Also, some working parents view fragmented program rules as difficult to navigate with programs not designed to support upward economic mobility. These as well as other barriers challenge agencies to streamline coordination among programs. This analysis by the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, using pre-COVID pandemic data, looks at the reach of the social safety net, including the interaction of specific programs, to better understand program participation as the economy continues to recover.

Experiments conducted in the mid-1990s show that a combination of work requirements and work supports substantially increased the employment of cash assistance recipients in Aid to Families with Dependent Children, while having little effect on recipients’ average income. There is little evidence on the effects of TANF’s work requirements, though, and recent research on other means-tested programs demonstrates that their work requirements have had little effect on employment and have substantially reduced the number of people receiving the benefits they provide. Using administrative data, this Congressional Budget Office working paper examines how Alabama’s recent expansion of its TANF work requirement to the parents of children between the ages of 6 months and 11 months affects their employment and income.

The Administration for Children and Families (ACF) will host a webinar on March 16, 2023 at 1:00 p.m. ET. This webinar will include ACF leaders who will discuss the President’s FY2024 budget requests and how it can make a difference for all those ACF serves.

The Office of Family Assistance (OFA) hosted a webinar on March 21, 2023 — the second of a two-part webinar series entitled, The Whole Family Approach: How TANF Programs Can Engage Customers in Mental Health Services. In Part I of the webinar series on January 26, 2023, State and Tribal TANF programs discussed the intersection between poverty, trauma, and mental health and highlighted how their programs have helped improve long-term mental health outcomes for families with low incomes.

Part 2 built on the concepts introduced in Part I and the speakers shared the details of their programs’ whole family design and implementation processes, including how they identify services to include in their TANF programs, how they select and coordinate with supportive partnerships, what types of assessments they use when meeting with clients, and funding streams they utilize. They also highlighted successes and challenges they have experienced throughout the process. Participants received insights into the options TANF programs can explore in expanding and improving the mental health care for their TANF customers.

Children rely on the adults in their lives to provide safety and security; unfortunately, this is often difficult for adults living in poverty to provide. As a result, some children living in poverty face developmental challenges that may affect their well-being long term. This article discusses how poverty affects children's brain development and mental health. It also covers risk factors that may affect brain development, how a family’s economic status impacts the amount of gray and white matter volumes in the brain (gray matter controls movement, memory, and emotions while white matter helps with the transfer of information within the brain), and medical and counseling recommendations. Further, the article identifies a number of existing anti-poverty programs, including TANF, that may help reduce the financial burden of living in poverty.

The Office of Family Assistance has released tables that provide demographic data on the age, gender, and race/ethnicity of adults and children in TANF and Separate State Program-Maintenance-of-Effort active families and closed cases, as well as data on the financial circumstances of TANF cash assistance recipients for Federal fiscal year 2021. The data is presented for all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Guam. Data is available in Excel and PDF formats.

Recent state, tribal, and territorial use of pandemic emergency assistance funding (PEAF) demonstrated the utility of providing customized approaches to meet the needs of low-income families. Program evolution, whether driven by a pandemic, legislature, or new evidence-based knowledge about program effectiveness means changes in strategy, business processes, technology systems, and staff roles.

Too often, change is attempted without the creation of a proper foundation to support successful and sustainable implementation. The Office of Family Assistance hosted a webinar on February 23, 2023 to focus on two critical elements that can effectively drive implementation of new approaches and strategies: first, to develop a clear understanding and definition of success, and then, to ground implementation in proven organizational change strategies. During the webinar, speakers provided an overview of these topics and highlight specific examples from state TANF leaders.

Registration for this event is closed.

Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education (HMRE) programming is designed to teach participants how to communicate effectively, manage conflict, identify signs of an unhealthy relationship, and other skills important for developing and maintaining healthy relationships. While research evaluating HMRE programming effectiveness shows that programming often has positive impacts, research also points out that many program participants face additional life stressors that may interfere with healthy couple relationships and family functioning. This brief uses data from a sample of Hispanic couples who participated in an HMRE evaluation to show the prevalence of some of the key economic, demographic, and personal stressors that research identifies as predictive of relationship quality. Some of the key findings of the study reflect that some stressors cannot be eliminated by HMRE programs, and that other stressors (e.g., housing hardship or poor health) can be addressed by utilization of other social service programs, such as TANF, Medicaid, or subsidized housing.

When people struggle to make ends meet, public benefit programs have the potential to help them meet their basic needs for food, housing, health care, and cash. Yet many families and individuals do not participate in the programs that could help meet their needs and for which they are eligible. This report presents a menu of strategies that have the potential to increase access to individual public benefit programs or a package of benefits. Strategies for improving public benefit access can involve revising service delivery practices and processes, changing state or local policies, or using or improving technology. The report focuses on Illinois, but the strategies identified are relevant throughout the country.

The Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) Data Collaborative Pilot Initiative is a component of the TANF Data Innovation project. The 30-month pilot offered technical assistance and training to support cross-disciplinary teams of staff at eight state and county TANF programs in the routine use of TANF and other administrative data to inform policy and practice. This collection of eight profiles summarizes the data analytics projects undertaken by teams from California, Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Utah, and Virginia. Each profile provides project-specific details for each pilot, including the research questions, data landscape, approach and research methods, and initial findings and next steps as well as an overview of the state TANF program.