Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Researchers and advocates argue that the US cash assistance program, TANF, should do more to address participants’ underlying challenges and attend to the wellbeing of children in participants’ families. These calls respond to the growing concentration of extreme disadvantage among families served by TANF, along with increasing evidence of the negative implications of economic insecurity for children’s healthy development. However, this level of service—particularly attention to children’s wellbeing—remains rare in TANF. Representing a move in this direction, in 2013 California enacted the Family Stabilization (FS) program within the state’s TANF system. The FS program provides TANF participants experiencing destabilizing crises with temporary relief from work requirements; intensive case management; and enhanced services aimed at addressing barriers to employment, including services to participants’ children and other family members, as needed. California allowed its 58 county social service agencies—which administer TANF locally—considerable flexibility in the design and implementation of their local FS programs, and state-level research suggests largely positive implementation experiences (Davis et al., 2016).

In this study, we draw on California’s successful implementation of the FS program to build understanding of how state and local TANF agencies might incorporate more holistic, family- and child-focused services within TANF. We make this contribution drawing on in-depth interviews with key informants in a diverse set of 11 northern California county social service agencies. Study findings will be particularly relevant to TANF practitioners, as we examine both the distinct paths counties took in designing and implementing their FS programs, as well as how these implementation choices responded to agency and community context.

Respondents in study counties uniformly expressed excitement at the opportunity to use the FS program to provide what they described as much-needed service enhancements. However, study counties followed several different design and implementation approaches. Smaller counties with basic preexisting TANF support services used the FS program to upgrade supports in core areas, including mental health, substance abuse, and domestic violence services. Larger counties with rich preexisting services added specialized units of social workers and expanded services in ways newly allowed by the FS program—such as funding mental health services for participants’ children, and dedicating more caseworker time to support participants navigating complex systems. Although counties’ implementation approaches related closely to preexisting TANF services and staffing—and to some extent to agency and county size—we found fewer links between county economic and demographic context and FS program design and implementation choices.

Study findings suggest there are multiple possible routes to meeting the growing need for enhanced supports to TANF participants and their children—and that responsiveness to agency service and staffing strengths and gaps may be a key factor in successful implementation of such enhancements. As the social services sector moves towards an evidence-based program model, with the associated emphasis on implementation fidelity, study findings serve as a reminder of the value of local flexibility in program design and implementation and underscore the importance of selecting and implementing evidence-based programs in ways that respond to local agency context.