A new brief describes how Sacramento County’s Department of Child Support Services (DCSS) and its partner, the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Sacramento, implemented the My Empowerment (M.E.) Project and lessons learned. The M.E. Project educates teens and young adults about the financial, legal, and emotional responsibilities of parenthood and is funded by a Charting a Course for Economic Mobility and Responsible Parenting demonstration grant from the federal Office of Child Support Services. This implementation summary brief is part of MEF’s mixed-methods evaluation of the M.E. Project for DCSS.

The Procedural Justice-Informed Alternatives to Contempt (PJAC) demonstration project aimed to address noncustodial parents’ reasons for nonpayment of child support orders, promote their positive engagement with the child support program and custodial parents, and improve the consistency and completeness of their child support payments by testing a new approach to service delivery. A new report and brief use data collected during the public health emergency to examine how three of those child support agencies experienced the COVID-19 pandemic. The report focuses on how employment, earnings, unemployment insurance, and debt balance patterns changed for members of the PJAC sample after the onset of the pandemic. The brief focuses on how child support service delivery, rates of enforcement, and use of contempt changed after the onset of the pandemic. Both the report and brief examine staff and parent experiences and perspectives during the pandemic. 

Federal guidance allows Head Start grant recipients to apply to the Office of Head Start to shift funding (i.e., convert enrollment slots) from Head Start services for preschool-age children to Early Head Start services for pregnant women, infants, and toddlers. This process necessitates strategic planning and the careful development and implementation of new processes with the aim of ensuring high-quality service delivery tailored to the unique needs of pregnant women, infants, and toddlers and delivered in accordance with the Head Start Program Performance Standards. This report presents findings from case studies of six grant recipients that converted enrollment slots from Head Start to Early Head Start in 2021.

MEF staff Asaph Glosser, Kate Stepleton, and Imani Hutchinson are co-authors on a recently released report to Congress evaluating the implications of child support cooperation requirements for families receiving SNAP. This project involved in-depth qualitative research in states with cooperation requirements, including interviews with program staff and families subject to the requirement. It also involved detailed quantitative analysis of program data and a cost analysis in one state. The findings are critical in informing ongoing discussions about the interaction between the child support program and public benefits programs.

Over the past three years, we partnered with the Urban Institute on “Integrating Financial Capability and Employment Services,” a study for OPRE. The study built knowledge about the extent, forms, and practices of integrating financial capability interventions with employment and training (E&T) programs serving adults with low incomes. We are excited to share our new report on this work, Understanding Financial Capability Interventions within Employment-Related Contexts for Adults with Low Incomes: Final Report. It summarizes the study’s key findings on organizations’ approaches to integrating financial capability and E&T services, their motivations for doing so, the types of financial capability services they offer, participant perspectives on programs offering integrated services, and considerations for future research on the effectiveness of integrated models. We have also released three related briefs from the project: 1) Integrating financial capability and employment and training services: Participant perspectives; 2) Preemployment Credit Checks: Employer Practices, Worker Outcomes, and Implications for Practice and Research; and 3) Investing in Employee Financial Well-Being: Employer-Provided Financial Capability Services. 

A new report from the Evaluation of Tennessee’s TANF Opportunity Act summarizes the project’s evaluation design and participant characteristics for the early sample. It describes how seven community-led pilots in Tennessee provide care coordination and direct services to help families improve economic mobility and family well-being, and presents the mixed-method, randomized controlled trial evaluation designs for each pilot.