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Video

Standing on Our Principles: How the Child Tax Credit can Promote the Economic Security and Well-Being of Children and Families

June 2024

Every child deserves the opportunity to grow and thrive. During this briefing from June 2024, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (CT-3) and Rep. Jimmy Gomez (CA-34) spoke about the importance of expanding the Child Tax Credit (CTC) to reduce child poverty, and a panel of parents from across the country discussed how the CTC can promote family well-being and bring equity to the tax code as we look toward 2025 and the expiration of key provisions of the Trump Administration’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.

Tags: Addressing Poverty, Automatic Benefit for Children (ABC) Coalition
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Policy Paper

Strategies to Compensate Unpaid Caregivers: A Policy Scan

March 2024

Caregiving is essential work, but this work too often falls on individuals with little or no support from society as a whole. As a result, many caregivers experience severe economic security and hardship—especially women, and Black, Latinx/e, and other women of color and immigrant women in particular, who provide the most care. To better understand the current policy gaps and how we might better support unpaid family caregivers moving forward, this new report summarizes the policies in place to compensate family caregivers in the United States and abroad and offers recommendations for ensuring future policies more effectively support unpaid caregivers and their families.

(29 pp)

Tags: Addressing Poverty, Building Strong Communities, Racial Equity & Justice, Young Children & Their Families
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Brief

Direct File: How Parent and Family Engagement in Design Can Improve Access to Refundable Credits

March 2024

The IRS, with the support of partners like the CSSP, has been ensuring that families who are most impacted by barriers to tax filing, such as the  complexity and costs, have been delivering feedback throughout the design and development process of this new Direct File program. Based on what CSSP heard through this engagement, several early lessons emerged not only about how to improve the tool based on feedback that reflects a diversity of circumstances and situations, but also about the needs that tax filers have as they go through the process that the tool itself cannot  address.

(3 pp)

Tags: Addressing Poverty, Racial Equity & Justice
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Video

Culture is Healing: Removing the Barriers from Culturally Responsive Services (Webinar)

January 2024

In this webinar, community providers discuss the challenges they face in providing responsive services, including building evidence and operating in the context of restrictive “evidence-based” standards, as well as recommendations for actions state and federal policymakers can take to ensure all families have the support they need through expanding access and availability of programs that are developed by and for communities of color.

Read the report here. 

Tags: Addressing Poverty, Building Strong Communities, Child Welfare, Racial Equity & Justice, Young Children & Their Families
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Policy Paper

Culture is Healing: Removing the Barriers Facing Providers of Culturally Responsive Services

January 2024

Ensuring child and family well-being requires a radically different, anti-racist response of supports that center the voices of diverse children and families of color, are dignified and strengths-based, and that are offered in spaces they trust. As this brief highlights, community-based organizations across the country are striving to answer that call despite numerous barriers. This brief lifts up the voices of those community providers, with the goal of highlighting and addressing the barriers that stand in the way of all families having the support they need.

Watch the webinar here. 

(19 pp)

Tags: Addressing Poverty, Building Strong Communities, Child Welfare, Racial Equity & Justice, Young Children & Their Families
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Policy Paper

Explainer: Why Racial Disparities in IRS Auditing Practices are an Urgent Matter of Family Economic Security

November 2023

This brief discusses the racial disparities in auditing that are an urgent matter of family economic security, and redressing those disparities to ensure that all families can file their taxes without fear of unjust surveillance or retribution.

(3 pp)

Tags: Addressing Poverty, Racial Equity & Justice
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Policy Paper

Designed to Keep You Down: TANF Creates Obstacles for Families Even as it Provides Critical Support

October 2023

This report shares findings from research conducted by the Center for the Study of Social Policy (CSSP) and parents participating in Project SPARC (Student Parents Are Reimagining CalWORKs), a project of the CalWORKs Association.

(26 pp)

Tags: Addressing Poverty, Building Strong Communities, Supporting Parenting Students in Public Systems
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Policy Paper

Supporting Youth Aging Out of Foster Care through SNAP

October 2023

The Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 (FRA) includes new provisions which should eliminate some of the barriers former foster youth have  experienced in accessing SNAP. This brief explains the new rules and the steps that state agencies can take to ensure that former foster youth are able to access the critical nutrition assistance they are now owed.

This brief updates a version originally published in 2016.

(11 pp)

Tags: Addressing Poverty, Child Welfare, Racial Equity & Justice, Youth
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Policy Paper

Housing is a Barrier for Parenting Students

September 2023

In 2022, the Center for the Study of Social Policy and Project SPARC conducted research to better understand the barriers experienced by parenting students participating in CalWORKs, California’s cash assistance program for families with children. This brief highlights findings from the research on parenting students’ experiences with housing.

(8 pp)

Tags: Addressing Poverty, Building Strong Communities, Racial Equity & Justice, Young Children & Their Families, Supporting Parenting Students in Public Systems
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Policy Paper

Parenting Students Need More Support Transferring to a Four-Year Institution

September 2023

In 2022, the Center for the Study of Social Policy and Project SPARC conducted research to better understand the barriers experienced by parenting students in CalWORKs, California’s cash assistance program for families with children. This brief highlights findings from the research on parenting students’ experiences transferring to four-year institutions.

(5 pp)

Tags: Addressing Poverty, Building Strong Communities, Racial Equity & Justice, Young Children & Their Families, Supporting Parenting Students in Public Systems
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