Policy & Regulation

This brief highlights key themes and ideas from a Health and Human Services (HHS) Convening on Advancing Primary Prevention in Human Services in August 2022. With a particular focus on prevention of youth and family homelessness, the convening featured the perspectives of academic experts, program administrators, federal colleagues, and people with lived expertise.

Social safety net programs provide different types of support to people facing economic hardship. This data point presents estimates of overall participation in the social safety net in 2019, the latest year of available data and presents rates of participation in multiple programs. Key Points:

People facing economic instability often need more than one program or service. This pre-pandemic analysis looks at the reach of the social safety net, including the interaction of specific programs, to better understand program participation as the economy continues to recover. Key Points:

This tip sheet provides key considerations for how organizations can identify potential diverse external partners, conduct outreach to them, and build and sustain productive relationships with them.

This guide explores opportunities to advance equity in quantitative analysis, including by recognizing common biases (e.g., research and measurement bias) and discussing specific quantitative methods and tools to help quantitative analyses address equity.

This tip sheet highlights the importance of using equitable communication and includes tips, guiding questions, and additional resources. The information is organized around three key strategies for equitable communication:

This guide explores intersectionality and why it is essential for advancing equity. It explores strategies for planning and conducting research with an intersectional lens, describes quantitative measures and methods to examine differences across groups of people with intersecting identities, and provides key considerations for using qualitative data to better understand intersectionality.

This tool describes how to conduct intensive equity assessments of existing programs, policies, and processes. The tool first describes the scoping work that needs to be done before conducting an equity assessment and then describes and provides guiding questions for each of the six steps in the in-depth equity assessment process. Those six steps are:

This tool describes the six steps for conducting equity assessments and provides tips for completing each step. Although specific steps vary by equity assessment tool and context, core steps include:

The Early Childhood Systems Collective Impact Project (ECS Collective Impact Project) will help to re-envision a truly coordinated approach to program implementation designed to advance equitable early childhood and family well-being outcomes across federal programs that support expectant parents, children ages 0 to 8, and their families.