In 2014, the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) selected AARP Foundation to receive a three-year grant under the Social Innovation Fund (SIF) to operate and evaluate the Women’s Economic Stability Initiative (WESI) in multiple locations.
Objectives: We studied whether use of farm-to-consumer (FTC) retail outlets (e.g., farmers market, farm/roadside stand) was associated with daily fruit and vegetable (F&V) intake or obesity status among women who participate in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) in Birmingham, AL.
Many families receiving publicly-funded child care vouchers choose legally unregulated family friend and neighbors (FFN) to care for their children while they work. This paper focuses on the experiences of these providers with the voucher system in selected communities. This paper discusses findings from interviews with subsidy agency staff and administrators in five sites, and focus groups with unregulated providers in three of these sites, in 2004.
Over recent decades, policymakers have recognized that helping parents on welfare pay for child care is essential to help them move from welfare to work. As such, child care has consistently been an integral part of federal and state welfare reform efforts. It was a major focus of the 1996 welfare reform legislation, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), and of the cash assistance and welfare-to-work program it established—the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program.
Child care subsidies are an important support service for families moving from welfare to work. The connections between child care and work, and the work oriented focus within the welfare system since welfare reform, have increased the need for links between the welfare-to-work and child care subsidy systems to ensure families receiving TANF and moving off TANF are connected to child care subsidies. This paper summarizes findings from the third phase of the study.
Despite the critical role child care subsidies play in welfare-to-work efforts, little research has examined how sites have approached putting these services together for families. The Urban Institute engaged in a multiyear study to help fill the information gap about the complex interactions of these two systems on behalf of welfare families (box 2). This study occurred in three phases.