Bringing H.E.A.R.T. to the Office of Family Assistance

Nisha Patel, new Office of Family Assistance DirectorBy Nisha Patel, Director, Office of Family Assistance

The Office of Family Assistance (OFA) administers federal grant programs that foster family economic security, including the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program and the Tribal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (Tribal TANF) program, Native Employment Works, Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood grants, and Health Profession Opportunity Grants. As the new director of OFA, the beginning of a new year seemed an opportune time to introduce our top priorities going forward and to share a bit about the values that I bring to the role.

I come to the OFA humbly and with a sense of urgency given the context facing our nation’s children and families, who are resilient despite obstacles to their dreams of stability, opportunity and prosperity. Some important data points that inform my goals at OFA are:

• 45 percent of children are growing up in low-income families
• 32 percent of white and Asian-American children live in low-income families and 65 percent of African-American, American Indian, and Hispanic children live in low-income families
• 25 percent of children are growing up in single-parent households
• Education and training beyond high school are increasingly important for parents to secure jobs that pay family sustaining wages
• Parents’ economic stability, educational attainment, and overall health impact child outcomes
• Children’s educational and healthy development serves as a motivator for parents’ desire for increased economic security for their families

While our charge is challenging, together with our state, tribal, and community partners, we have the ability to create better outcomes for families. To do so, we will need not only to implement evidence-based policies and programs, but also to examine promising new approaches. 

Our top priorities at OFA for 2015-2016 are to:

• Increase family economic security and stability by supporting our partners to design and implement programs that focus simultaneously on parental employment and child and family well-being
• Promote collaboration among human services agencies, workforce agencies, and educational institutions to encourage service delivery that addresses outcomes for both parents and their children

Within the federal government we use a lot of acronyms. I offer you a new one, which I hope you will find meaningful and memorable: HEART, which summarizes the core values I bring to this work as leader:

• Humanity: While policies and programs are the tools of our trade, I start with the perspective of families first.  I encourage all of us to consider what the policy and programmatic decisions we make will mean for the families that we serve.
• Excellence: I hold myself, the OFA team, and our grantee partners to high standards.  For example, this includes keeping abreast of the latest research and information on evidence-informed practice, incorporating it into our work, and sharing it with the field.
• Accountability: The OFA team and I, and our grantee partners, are accountable to one another and to the families we serve.  For example, we are increasing emphasis on performance and outcome measures for OFA’s discretionary grants.
• Resilience: While the families we serve are sometimes referred to as “needy,” I take a strengths-based perspective.  Any family that has been through struggle ultimately has to be resilient to survive and to thrive.  We will need to be equally resilient, given the challenging and changing context in which we work.
• Transparency: I hold this as an important principle in government.  Beyond just sharing information, transparency includes clear and consistent communication, across the OFA team and with our grantee partners, stakeholders, and the public.  For example, this year states will be submitting and we will be reporting more accurate data on how TANF funds are spent.

I look forward to connecting with leaders in the public, private, nonprofit, and philanthropic sectors and working together to create better outcomes for our nation’s children and families.  For more information about our work, I invite you to visit the OFA website.