Health Profession Opportunity Grants and TANF Partnerships: Lessons Learned in Engaging TANF Participants

By Health Profession Opportunity Grants Program

Authorized by the Affordable Care Act, the Health Profession Opportunity Grants (HPOG) program helps low income individuals receive health care education and training. The program serves the dual purpose of increasing the nation’s health care workforce while also putting low income Americans on a path to self-sufficiency. 

In its first three years, HPOG has served 24,558 participants across 23 states, 32 grantees, including five tribal organizations. Grantees focus on serving the most in-need individuals, including those receiving Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) cash assistance. TANF recipients made up 17 percent of the total served. Since TANF recipients are an important target population of the grant, each grantee sets annual goals for TANF participation in their program.  

The HPOG program recently published a paper to share the successful strategies our grantees have used to engage TANF participants.  While this paper offers peer technical assistance for HPOG grantees, its contents are relevant to other workforce development, training, and educational institutions that serve TANF recipients. It includes a checklist of effective strategies based on the experiences of six HPOG grantees and their TANF agency partners. The contents of the check list include two overarching themes and a number of strategies to accomplish those themes: 

Collaboration between programs:

• Include TANF partners early.
• Establish formal agreements.
• Align service approaches between HPOG and TANF.
• Co-locate services.
• Share success stories.
   

Engagement of participants:

• Create structured identification and referral processes.
• Provide intensive case management supports.
• Address TANF work participation requirements.

The paper walks through each of these strategies in detail, citing specific examples from the six HPOG grantees featured. The highlighted grantees met their TANF enrollment goals and/or introduced creative methods to partner with TANF agencies or engage TANF participants.