Survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking need access to education and job training programs that are grounded in trauma-informed practices. Futures Without Violence hosted a webinar in January 2022 and focused on recognizing barriers to employment and education for survivors and strategies for building strong cross-sector collaborations between advocacy service providers and workforce development programs.

Very few domestic violence survivors are getting Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) waivers from the work requirements and time limits, despite being eligible. Federal law allows states to grant domestic violence waivers to TANF recipients when time limits, work requirements, and other policies would unfairly penalize victims of abuse or increase their risk of abuse. This Rutgers resource was developed through an examination of the annual reports from Michigan to the federal government on the number of domestic violence waivers issued from 2008 to 2021, as well as focus groups with TANF caseworkers. This resource discusses the importance of waivers for survivors and other work being done around this issue.

In recent years, local, state, and federal child support offices started reexamining how their enforcement and collection roles can be paired with services that foster meaningful parental engagement and invest in the social and economic well-being of parents paying child support. In examining child support services, it is important to understand the reach they have throughout federal benefits. Across the continuum of human services programs, rules related to child support can impact whether someone qualifies for benefits, what amount they can receive, or the amount of child support they owe – including but not limited to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Medicaid, childcare, and child welfare. Often, federal and state policies’ options regarding child support practices are made by individual programs in distinct silos from each other. This American Public Human Services Association resource discusses strategies that can help create the enabling conditions for continued progress in re-centering state and local child support collaborations with other human services program areas.

The Administration for Children and Families’ (ACF) inaugural data strategy provides a north star to ensure that data delivers for the people ACF serves. ACF recognizes that better data capacity internally and throughout the human services ecosystem can lead to improved operations, more informed policy, and faster, more proactive, and safer delivery of public benefits and services. This ACF resource explains the data strategy, which builds on their existing progress to better use, share, and analyze data at ACF. The strategy includes a dozen individual initiatives that fall into four categories: sustaining initiatives; one-stop shop initiatives; delivery initiatives; and technology initiatives. These categories include building foundational infrastructure such as hiring ACF’s first ever Chief Data Officer and establishing a Data Governance Council; supporting program offices by creating a Data Talent Center to provide expertise in hiring and retaining data talent; and sharing data regularly through community-centered data tools and stories.

This Office of Research, Planning and Evaluation resource shares three strategies, identified from the Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency-Next Generation project report published earlier this year, to help program staff understand client needs better and improve client engagement. The resource uses examples from the report that details the approach that Monroe County in New York took to improve attendance at activities required by the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program.

Supporting families and individuals means understanding that their needs are complex, interrelated, and affected by the opportunities available in their communities. Integrated service approaches to prevent homelessness or involvement in systems like child welfare may be best positioned to succeed when they recognize these holistic needs and identities and when they coordinate access to resources and services. This Mathematica brief highlights the efforts made by programs to coordinate services and supports for participants by focusing on their holistic needs, including how programs identified their participants’ strengths and needs and how the sites integrated services to be responsive to those needs. The findings are based on interviews with staff and partners from nine case studies sites across the country and with people who have been served by these programs.

These Office for Family Assistance resources provide demographic data on adults and children in Temporary Assistance for Needy Families active families receiving cash assistance and closed cases. National and state-level data are available, as well as data on families receiving assistance through Separate State Program (SSP)-Maintenance-of-Effort (MOE) programs.

In September 2024, the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) continued its investment in economic mobility with a gathering of state government officials from across ACF’s Region V. This gathering emphasized the role states can play in engaging families in the policy process, including working with philanthropy to ensure funding for creative solutions to problems confronting parents, and actively collaborating with state legislators to ensure the actionability of legislative solutions. This ACF resource provides a recap of the Region V summit, including an overview of each state’s innovative strategies to support expectant parents and the parents of young children. Strategies highlighted include the creation of a Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) engagement unit in Illinois, expansion of Medicaid coverage for 12 months postpartum in Indiana, the launching of Family Connects in Ohio and Family Impacts Teams project in Michigan, standing up of the newly created Department of Children, Youth, and Families in Minnesota, and the creation of the Wisconsin Child Support Parent Advisory Group.

In response to the joint memo from the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) and the Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service where they expressed their awareness of increasing reports of Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) theft, Congress passed the Consolidated Continuing Appropriations Act in December 2022 to outline provisions for the use of federal funds to replace stolen Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits. This ACF program instruction provides guidance to states in the use of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) funds to support families facing an economic crisis, primarily due to the loss of TANF benefits stolen via card skimming, card cloning, and other similar fraudulent methods.