TANF Data Innovation

Project

Overview

Project Overview

TANF Data Innovation (TDI) is a new national initiative to support Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) agencies as they harness the full potential of using administrative records data to improve program administration, payment integrity, and outcomes for low-income families. Launched in 2017, TDI is sponsored by the Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation (OPRE) in collaboration with the Office of Family Assistance (OFA), in the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

The TDI team will work with TANF agencies in building long-term staff capacity at the local, state, and federal levels, while also making immediate contributions to the quality of TANF data. By supporting agencies in institutionalizing modern data integration strategies and the broader human services community in using data analysis for program improvement, TDI is intended to facilitate a lasting benefit to the TANF evidence base. Its goals are consistent with stated aims in the President’s FY 2018 proposed budget and the legislation that led to the formation of the Commission on Evidence-Based Policymaking.

The TDI project is currently conducting stakeholder interviews and preparing to conduct a needs assessment survey for all states. We anticipate launching the official TDI website in the first quarter of 2019, with initial training offerings.

Join the TDI mailing list!

To contact the TDI team, email [email protected]

STATUS: Current

Basics

Issue: Work and Income Security

Focus Area: Welfare Reform

Population: Low-Income Populations

Focus Population: Welfare Recipients

The TANF Data Collaborative Launches

MDRC is pleased to launch the TANF Data Collaborative, an exciting new effort to accelerate the use of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) data, earnings data, and other administrative data for program improvement and evidence building at the federal, state, and local levels.

Agenda, Scope, <br> & Goals

Agenda, Scope, and Goals

TANF Data Innovation (TDI) has the following planned key components:

National learning collaborative of TANF agencies and their partners: Training and technical assistance (TTA) to states on using TANF data for improving performance and building evidence. The TTA will include a range of options to help states progress along a TANF data innovation pathway.
Increased level of readiness to use data and analytics: Informed by a state needs assessment survey and input from key stakeholders, the goal of the multi-year TTA effort is to meet states where they are and enable a new level of readiness to use data and analytics.
TDI Learning Community website: This website will provide the key vehicle for facilitating an interactive learning community among state agencies and staff, including trainings, hands-on workshops, webinars, one-on-one technical consultations, and convenings. It will also serve as a repository of easily accessible tools, templates, coding, and case studies to help agency staff using data to inform program administration and policies.
Wide range of TTA: TDI will offer trainings, for example, to create effective dashboards and data visualizations of program performance, to support states’ building their capacity to link multiple data sources to understand the changing dynamics of welfare caseloads, to identify the pathways out of welfare, to predict who may best benefit from specific social programs, and to provide leadership training in the rapidly expanding data-rich environment.
Pilots for incubating and executing ideas: TDI will provide an opportunity for a subset of TANF agencies to become pilot sites, further accelerating learning and implementing specific projects relevant to participating agencies. Selected pilot sites will form a hands-on learning community, receive more intensive TTA, and be provided with resources to support their efforts. Lessons learned from these pilot efforts will advance practice in the field as a whole.
Payment integrity practices and lessons: The TDI team will assess states’ current uses of integrated data to improve the integrity and accuracy of TANF payments and will provide best practices and tools for improving efficiency and effectiveness of state payment integrity procedures.
Capacity building at the federal level: TDI will support the building of TANF data capacity at the federal level.
Successes and challenges: TDI will disseminate the successes TANF agencies achieved and the challenges they faced and overcame as part of the TDI Learning Collaborative through the website, case studies, and other vehicles.

STATUS: Current

Basics

Issue: Work and Income Security

Focus Area: Welfare Reform

Population: Low-Income Populations

Focus Population: Welfare Recipients

The TANF Data Collaborative Launches

Design, Sites, & <br> Data Sources

Design, Sites, and Data Sources

The TANF Data Innovation (TDI) collaborative is national in scope and operates at the federal, state and local levels. The main data sources include (but are not limited to) state and federal TANF and employment administrative data. The design of each pilot will be driven by the programmatic questions that are most important to our TANF collaborative members.

STATUS: Current

Basics

Issue: Work and Income Security

Focus Area: Welfare Reform

Population: Low-Income Populations

Focus Population: Welfare Recipients

The TANF Data Collaborative Launches

Funders & <br />Partners

Funders

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, OPRE

Partners

University of Pennsylvania, Actionable Intelligence for Social Policy (AISP)

Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago

New York University’s Center for Urban Science and Progress

Public Strategies, Inc.

Aaron Hill, Parsons School of Design

MDRC Staff

Richard Hendra
Director, MDRC Center for Data Insights
Hendra directs the Center for Data Insights which is bringing state of the art data science methods to help harness data to improve programs and better serve populations in need. During his tenure at MDRC, Hendra has led the research on a range of welfare, housing, asset building, and workforce development projects.
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Barbara S. Goldman
Vice President, Director of Deployment and Accountability
As vice president for accountability and deployment, Goldman is a member of MDRC’s corporate management team, responsible for assessing staffing needs and leading MDRC’s Quality Assurance and Risk Management program covering all of MDRC’s projects.

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Stephanie Rubino
Research Associate, Low-Wage Workers and Communities Policy Area
Rubino currently serves as the resource manager on the Social Innovation Fund’s WorkAdvance and SaveUSA studies, and for MDRC’s portfolio of housing projects, which includes the Family Self Sufficiency Program Evaluation, the Rent Reform Demonstration, and the Choice Neighborhoods Demonstration.
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Kristin Porter
Senior Associate, K-12 Education Policy Area
Porter, deputy director of MDRC Center for Data Insights, is a statistician with expertise in predictive analytics, causal inference, and statistical computing.
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Erika Lundquist
Research Associate, Family Well-Being and Children’s Development Policy Area
Lundquist has several years of experience evaluating social programs and policies.
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Alexandra Pennington
Research Associate, Low-Wage Workers and Communities Policy Area
Pennington joined MDRC in 2006. She has been involved in many aspects of MDRC’s research, including program start-up, survey development, data management, implementation and impact analyses, report writing, and technical assistance with data.
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Stephen Freedman
Senior Associate, Low-Wage Workers and Communities Policy Area
Freedman manages the collection and assembly of data from surveys and administrative records and the programming of large multisource data sets to study the use of program services, employment behavior, household income, assets and debt, and other indicators of financial well-being for low- and moderate-income populations.
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David Navarro
Research Associate, Low-Wage Workers and Communities Policy Area
Navarro, a research associate in MDRC’s California office, has over 31 years of experience as an information services and operations liaison for over 60 sites, covering 21 evaluations and demonstrations of innovative programs to help low-income people become self-sufficient.
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Melissa Wavelet
Senior Fellow, Postsecondary Education Policy Area
Wavelet joined MDRC as a senior fellow in 2019 from the Colorado Department of Human Services, where she was the director of the Office of Performance and Strategic Outcomes. Before that, she was in executive roles in Wisconsin and New York City governments.

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STATUS: Current

Basics

STATUS: Current

Basics

STATUS: Current

Basics