Introduction
Healthy families help children thrive. Healthy Marriage (HM) and Responsible Fatherhood (RF) programs are designed to support healthy relationships, positive parenting, and economically secure households for the well-being and long-term success of children and families.
- HM grantees deliver services to adult individuals, adult couples, and youth. HM grant funds may be used for eight legislatively authorized activities such as marriage and relationship education, public media campaigns, and education in high schools.
- RF grantees deliver services to community fathers and couples who enrolled in community-based RF programs and reentering fathers who were incarcerated at enrollment, but would be released within three to nine months, or had recently been released. (Results for RF community couples are combined with community fathers in the snapshot.) The authorizing legislation requires RF grantees to offer services in the areas of responsible parenting, economic stability, and healthy marriage and relationship education.
For both HM and RF programs, the primary type of service provided is group-based workshops. The Administration for Children and Families (ACF) also expects grantees to provide individual services such as case management and referrals.
As of 2022, Congress has funded four rounds of grants for HM and RF programs. The Office of Family Assistance (OFA) in ACF awards the HMRF grants and oversees the grantees. The Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE)—also in ACF—in collaboration with OFA, leads the Fatherhood and Marriage Local Evaluation (FaMLE) Cross-Site Project and the Building Usage, Improvement, and Learning with Data in HMRF Programs (BUILD HMRF) project. The purpose of FaMLE Cross-Site and BUILD HMRF is to support ACF’s learning agenda and enable the HMRF grantees to measure their program performance and make data-driven decisions for program improvement. OPRE contracted with Mathematica to conduct the FaMLE Cross-Site and BUILD projects.
Research questions:
- How did HMRF programs recruit and serve clients?
- How did grantees staff HMRF programs, and what implementation challenges did programs face?
- What were the characteristics of clients who enrolled in HMRF programs, and how did their characteristics change from the beginning to the end of the program? What impacts did select HMRF programs have on clients?
Purpose
To better understand HMRF programs, the snapshots describe highlights from the 2015 cohort of HMRF grantees’ performance measures. They cover more than four years of grant operations—from July 2016 through September 2020 for most grantees (and through December 2020 for a few grantees that received extensions). The findings are based on performance measures that ACF required grantees to collect and report. A subset of grantees also conducted local evaluations to understand the effects of their programs.
Key Findings and Highlights
- Healthy Marriage grantees. The 2015 cohort had 45 HM grantees located in 20 states and territories. The programs enrolled 162,541 clients during more than four years of operations, which included 47,118 adult individuals, 48,897 clients in adult couples, and 66,526 youth clients. Nine of the 45 HM grantees completed impact local evaluations to examine whether and how the programs affected relationships, parenting, and economic well-being.
- Responsible Fatherhood grantees. In the 2015 cohort, there were 40 RF grantees located in 21 states. The programs enrolled 64,585 clients during more than four years of operations. That included 45,233 community fathers, 3,078 clients in community couples, and 16,274 reentering fathers. Among the 40 RF grantees, 8 completed impact local evaluations.
Methods
Grantees were responsible for collecting all performance measure data. Respondents included grantee staff members and clients (that is, the adults or youth served by the programs). As clients progressed through the program, grantees asked them to complete up to three surveys (at enrollment and at their first and last workshops).
The results are descriptive and include information such as means, percentages, and ranges. The results were based on performance measure data from July 2016 through September 2020 for most grantees. A few grantees received extensions; for them, the products include data through December 2020.
Some grantees complemented these data with evaluations of their programs. The local descriptive evaluations answered questions about grantees’ program operations and implementation, and the local impact evaluations answered questions about whether and how the programs affected clients’ relationships, parenting, and economic stability. To address these questions, grantees used the performance measure data, collected additional data, or both.
Citation
Avellar, Sarah and Pamela Holcomb. “Interactive Snapshots of the 2015 Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood Grantees." OPRE Report #2022-288. Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2022.
Glossary
- ACF:
- Administration for Children and Families
- BUILD HMRF:
- Building Usage, Improvement, and Learning with Data in HMRF Programs
- FaMLE Cross-Site:
- Fatherhood and Marriage Local Evaluation Cross-Site Project
- HM:
- Healthy marriage
- OFA:
- Office of Family Assistance
- OPRE:
- Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation
- RF:
- Responsible fatherhood