The Pew Charitable Trusts - State and Consumer Initiatives about

The White House Seeks to Expand Home Visiting Programs: Pew

The Obama administration has announced that it will seek a substantial new investment to expand voluntary evidence-based home visiting programs. Pew’s Libby Doggett, an expert on home visiting, highlights the importance of the decision. Voluntary home visiting matches parents with trained professionals to provide information and support during pregnancy and throughout their child’s first three years.

Why Are Welfare Rolls Flat, While the Food Stamp Program Grows Rapidly?

Advocates for the poor say welfare programs are ill-designed for hard economic times. Some Republicans, however, don’t see welfare as broken, but instead as a model for other social initiatives.

Battle Against Stalking Escalates

Concerns over in-person and online stalking have led lawmakers to create new orders of protection. But enforcement is often up to the victims and most don’t pursue it.

Child Abuse Prevention Month

39% of child abuse cases happen in the first four years of life. A good home visiting program can cut this number in half.

Perry Says State Will Maintain Women's Services

TODAY'S TAKE: Texas Governor Rick Perry told the President Obama that the state will find its own money to pay for women's health services if federal funding is cut off in a dispute over Planned Parenthood.

Rep. Jerry Madden: The Case for Home Visiting

State Representative Jerry Madden (R) describes how high-quality programs can help break the cycle of people going to prison.

Libby Doggett: The Case for Home Visiting

Pew Home Visiting Campaign Director Libby Doggett describes how high-quality programs can help prevent some of society's costliest problems.

Food Banks Drawing Statewide Attention

SOCIAL POLICY BEAT: Emergency food banks are attracting increased interest from state officials this year, but what many of them would like is more money.

States Get Chance to Experiment With Child Welfare Systems

More states will be given the opportunity to try and transform their child welfare systems with the help of federal dollars, but not without federal strings.

Voluntary Home Visiting Gives Parents and Children a Boost, Even Before Birth

Some of our nation’s costliest social problems are rooted in early childhood. Increasingly, states are turning to proven strategies like high-quality home visitation to prevent them. Read our fact sheet to learn more.

Texas Saves Big Money Through Effective Child Support Enforcement

The Lone Star state may know more than any other about collecting overdue child support. And in a tough budget year, the state managed to increase funds for a novel program that gives noncustodial parents who are behind on child support a choice: a job or jail.

Transforming Public Education

In its final report, Pre-K Now laid out a strategy to transform public education by moving from the current K-12 model to a more effective, evidence-based pre-K-12 system.

Libby Doggett: Home Visiting Programs Get a Funding Boost

Libby Doggett discusses how federal funding for the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program has impacted state initiatives.

Infographic: Aging Boomers

55 million Americans will be 65 and older by 2020.

Driving Services Help Senior Mobility Without Spending Public Money

Many elderly people have difficulty driving, but lack access to public transit. There's a growing movement to solve their problem.

Home Visiting Inventory

The following data from the 2010 Pew Center on the States home visiting survey of agency leaders provide an inventory of FY 2009-2010 state home visitation programs, models, and funding.

Food Stamp Rolls Reach Historic Levels

More Americans than ever before are getting federal help to buy groceries. Which state is seeing caseloads grow the fastest? You might be surprised to find out.

Home Visiting: A Closer Look

Extra support from voluntary, high-quality home visiting services can lead to improved family health and substantial savings for taxpayers.

States and the New Federal Home Visiting Initiative

In 2010, the Pew Center on the States surveyed state agency leaders in an effort to inventory state home visiting programs in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

The Case for Home Visiting

This 2010 report examined how voluntary home visiting programs match parents with trained professionals to provide information and assistance during pregnancy and throughout their child's first three years. The report found that this support not only helps families thrive, but saves states money on costly social problems.

Tracking the Recession: Tuition Programs in Danger

As the Obama administration addresses the rising cost of college, many of the prepaid college tuition programs that help keep prices down have been damaged by the weak economy.

States Move to Regulate Senior Guardians

As the U.S. population ages and families scatter across the country, the frail elderly increasingly end up relying on court-appointed guardians when they can no longer take care of their personal affairs. California just joined six other states in watching over these professionals charged with protecting society's most vulnerable adults.

Silver Alert Helps Rescue Lost Seniors

(Updated 9:30 a.m EST, May 8, 2008)When an elderly person with dementia is lost, eight states can trigger an alert to let the community know. Proposals in Congress would expand the successful missing persons program to all 50 states.

Some states reconsider youth sex laws

Lawmakers across the country continue to mete out harsh punishments to sex offenders - from satellite tracking to the death penalty - but a handful of states have eased up on penalties in cases of youths prosecuted for consensual sex.

States Expand Kinship Care Programs

As the rolls of orphaned and neglected children swell, states increasingly are turning for help to grandparents and other family members, who now are providing homes for some 2.5 million children whose parents can no longer care for them. But the federal government hasn't made it easy.

Child-Support Enforcement Takes Hit

Deep slashes in the federal child-support enforcement program -- included in Congress' most recent budget cuts -- have left states searching for ways to avoid scaling back what has been hailed as the government's most successful social-services program.

Feds Pinch State Welfare Programs

Congress has reauthorized the 1996 welfare reform program -- Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) -- maintaining historic funding levels, but imposing tougher work standards. Welfare advocates say the new rules will discourage state innovation in work support programs. Supporters say the stricter rules will force states to do what the block grant program was originally intended to do -- move needy families from welfare to work.

Governors Talk About Ways to Aid Elderly

States must act to help the elderly enjoy their golden years with dignity and good health care, U.S. governors agreed Sunday. At the National Governors Association annual meeting, Idaho Gov. Dirk Kempthorne (R) listed 20 ways governors can improve lives of the aging and disabled.

Commission Calls for Foster Care Reforms

A panel of child welfare experts today called for a bevy of changes to fix flaws in the countrys foster care system that have allowed children to get stuck in foster care limbo for too long, suffer abuse and neglect and sometimes go missing. The new report targets two key areas as needing improvement: federal funding and judicial oversight.

Commission Launched to Reform Foster Care

Instances of children missing from foster care and suffering abuse and neglect while under state custody should motivate lawmakers to reform failing foster care programs, according to a new commission that plans to come up with recommendations to help improve the lives of foster children.

Education and Marital Status Key To Keeping Kids Out Of Poverty

The nation's new welfare program is a first step in improving the financial well-being of many of the nation's poor children, but it will fall well short of moving many of them out of poverty. An analysis of the working poor released yesterday by the Washington research group, Child Trends, finds children whose parents work as mandated by the new welfare law are far less likely to be poor than children in families whose parents are unemployed. But, the Child Trends analysis finds that improving work participation and marriage will not be enough.

Health Care Review Infrequently Used in Many States

Consumer clamor for health care reform has state and federal lawmakers scrambling to enact patient protection legislation before the year is out. But in over one-third of the states, laws have already been enacted that have established an independent, impartial process for appealing denials of coverage. The programs are quick, hassle-free and inexpensive, and patients have about a 50-50 chance of getting negative decisions from their health plan overturned. But a Kaiser Family Foundation Report and stateline.org research shows that programs remain obscure and infrequently used