Memphis

This report examines the progress of five demonstration sites in Broward County, Cedar Rapids, Memphis, San Francisco, and Connecticut as they provide supportive housing and intensive services to families in the child welfare system. Participating in the Partnership to Demonstrate the Effectiveness of Supportive Housing funded by the US Department of Health and Human Services, each site created new service delivery structures that integrate services among child welfare agencies, housing providers, and other service organizations.

The Evaluation of the Marriage and Family Strengthening Grants for Incarcerated and Reentering Fathers and their Partners (MFS-IP) is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) activities to support healthy marriage, responsible fatherhood, and successful re-entry from incarceration. Twelve grantees received funding for five years (2006-2011) from the Office of Family Assistance within the Administration for Children and Families to implement multiple activities to support and sustain marriages and families of fathers during and after incarceration.

Supportive Housing is an intervention that combines affordable housing with intensive wrap around services. The intervention has been successful with hard to serve populations, such as chronically homeless adults. Communities are testing the efficacy of supportive housing with high-need child welfare families to learn if providing supportive housing helps improve outcomes for children and families, spend taxpayer dollars more wisely, and lead to long-lasting systems change and service integration.

In 2007, New York City launched the first test of a conditional cash transfer program in the United States. Called Family Rewards, the program sought to break the intergenerational cycle of poverty by offering cash assistance to poor families to reduce immediate hardship, but conditioned this assistance on families’ efforts to improve their health, further their children’s education, and increase parents’ work and earnings, in the hope of reducing poverty over the long term. The program had positive effects on some outcomes, but left others unchanged.

Conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs use financial incentives that offer low-income families a way to reduce their immediate poverty while taking steps to improve their human capital. CCTs have spread across many lower- and middle-income nations with varying degrees of success. The first comprehensive CCT program in a high-income nation was a privately funded demonstration project conducted in New York City called Opportunity NYC—Family Rewards.

This research addresses the issues facing non-elderly people with disabilities as they seek affordable housing in their communities. The primary focus of this exploratory research is the influence of provisions of the Housing and Community Development Act of 1992 that permitted owners of certain HUD-assisted elderly housing (which may have previously served non-elderly people with disabilities) to limit admissions to elderly households.

Parents’ Fair Share (PFS) research on child support enforcement has several goals. First, it seeks to provide insights into the interaction between local child support enforcement systems and noncustodial parents whose children are on welfare. The approach taken in this report is to analyze what happened when the seven sites in the PFS Demonstration sought to identify low-income, unemployed noncustodial parents appropriate for PFS and refer them to the program. The report carries this story up to the point of referral of appropriate noncustodial parents to the program.

From 1995 to 2001, the U.S. Department of Labor and the Ford Foundation ran a demonstration of the Quantum Opportunity Program (QOP), mainly an after-school program that also began offering intensive and comprehensive services to at-risk youth when they entered ninth grade. QOP’s goals were to increase rates of high school graduation and enrollment in postsecondary education or training; secondary goals included improving high school grades and achievement test scores and reducing risky behaviors, such as substance abuse, crime, and teen parenting.

Fathers provide important financial and emotional support to their children. Yet low-income noncustodial fathers, with low wages and high rates of joblessness, often do not fulfill their parenting roles. The child support system has not traditionally helped these men to do so, since its focus has been on securing financial support from fathers who can afford to pay. Meanwhile, fathers who cannot pay child support accumulate debts that can lead them to evade the system and its penalties altogether - and further limit their contact with their children.

The welfare reforms of the 1990s dramatically increased the need for effective strategies to help low-income parents work more steadily and advance in the labor market; long-term reliance on public assistance is no longer an option for most families. Yet, while a great deal is known about how to help welfare recipients prepare for and find jobs, there is little hard evidence about what works to promote employment retention and advancement.