Integrating Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education with Economic Stability Services: Findings from Two Programs

This brief offers lessons for HMRE program providers seeking to integrate HMRE and economic stability services. It draws on the experiences of two social service agencies that received federal grants from OFA in 2015—The Parenting Center (TPC) in Fort Worth, Texas, and Family and Workforce Centers of America (FWCA) in St. Louis, Missouri—to design and implement such integrated programs. TPC’s program—Empowering Families—served couples with low incomes raising children together. FWCA’s program—Career STREAMS—served adults with low incomes seeking services at an employment center. Both agencies participated in a random assignment impact study of their programs as part of ACF’s Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services (STREAMS) evaluation. This brief draws on findings from the STREAMS impact studies as well as each agency’s experience delivering its program.

• Empowering Families and Career STREAMS both offered two distinct types of economic stability services: (1) employment services, such as career planning, résumé writing, interviewing skills, and job search strategies, and (2) financial literacy activities, such as identifying short- and long-term financial goals, developing budgets, and gaining education on financial topics such as credit, debt, banking, and investments.
• To increase participants’ access and exposure to these services, both programs took intentional steps to integrate content on employment and financial literacy into their core group workshops. Empowering Families featured an eight-session couples workshop that taught relationship skills integrated with content on employment and financial literacy. Career STREAMS featured a daily workshop for two weeks covering employment-related topics, relationship education, and financial literacy.
• Both programs supplemented their core group workshops with one-on-one employment services, but these services had lower take-up than expected. For Empowering Families, 33 percent of women and 28 percent of men met with an employment counselor. For Career STREAMS, more than 90 percent of participants met at least once with an employment case manager or job developer, but follow-up meetings were infrequent.
• Empowering Families offered one-on-one financial coaching as an additional program supplement. Take-up for this optional service was relatively low (52 percent) but higher than take-up for the program’s one-on-one employment counseling.
• Empowering Families did not improve employment outcomes but did reduce economic hardships. In addition, exploratory analyses suggested that Empowering Families improved participants’ perceived ability to manage their money, particularly for women, and that the program’s impacts on economic hardships were larger for couples who met with a financial coach.
• Career STREAMS succeeded in its goal of enrolling participants for whom both economic stability services and relationship education had relevance, but the program did not improve participants’ employment outcomes. Uneven attendance at the core group workshop, relatively infrequent one-on-one meetings with program staff, and the lack of program impacts on employment outcomes suggests it might have been hard for participants to fully engage in the program or that the program services did not fully align with participants’ needs.
• Taken together, the experiences of these programs suggest that meeting the employment needs of participants can be challenging and that providers should explore new approaches and ideas for providing employment services to HMRE program participants. However, employment is not the only determinant of economic stability, and the experience of the Empowering Families program points to several potential benefits of offering financial literacy services to HMRE program participants.

For Empowering Families, the STREAMS impact study enrolled 879 couples over a 28-month period from September 2016 through December 2018. The study team randomly assigned couples to one of two groups: (1) a program group that was offered participation in Empowering Families or (2) a control group that was not offered the program but was free to seek other services available in the community. For Career STREAMS, the impact study enrolled 908 individual participants over a similar period. The study team randomly assigned participants to either (1) a group that was offered participation in the Career STREAMS or (2) a control group that was offered participation in a traditional employment training program without any relationship education. For both programs, the study team measured program impacts about one year after participants had enrolled in the study.

Brian Goesling and Robert G. Wood. “Integrating Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education with Economic Stability Services: Findings from Two Programs.” OPRE report #2023-12. Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2022.