Announcement > Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Requests Comments

The Office of Family Assistance at the U.S. Department of Human Services has asked us to share the following information with you. A new set of Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood performance measures have been proposed. Please review this post to learn more information on how to request the proposed measures as well as more information on how to comment on the proposal.

The Proposed Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood Performance Measures and Additional Data Collection (Part of the Fatherhood and Marriage Local Evaluation and Cross-site [FaMLE Cross-site] Project) is seeking comments on the proposed set of data that will be collected around future grantee projects/programs.

The FaMLE Cross-site project will answer three main research questions: (1) What strategies did grantees use to design well-conceived programs? (2) What strategies did grantees use to successfully implement well-conceived programs? (3) What were the reported outcomes for participants in the programs? In order to answer these questions, they are considering a new set of data collection activities.

Background > For decades various organizations and agencies have been developing and operating programs to strengthen families through healthy marriage and relationship education and responsible fatherhood programming. The Administration for Children and Families (ACF), Office of Family Assistance (OFA), has had administrative responsibility for federal funding of such programs since 2006 through the Healthy Marriage (HM) and Responsible Fatherhood (RF) Grant Programs.

The federal government currently collects a set of performance measures from HM and RF grantees. The purpose of this previously approved information collection is to allow OFA and ACF to carry out their responsibilities for program accountability.

Current request > ACF is engaged in a learning agenda to increase their understanding of Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood programs. This means that they incorporate multiple opportunities and options for learning throughout a program's implementation that provide a range of insights and perspectives. These opportunities help programming constantly develop and advance. For example, data provide the opportunity to feed information back to decision-makers and leaders—both those on the ground and those in management—to inform program design, operation, and oversight.

On November 6, 2014, ACF published a Federal Register Notice (79 FR 65973) requesting public comment on a proposed new set of performance measures to be collected by all grantees, beginning with the next round of HMRF grants. These measures will collect standardized information in the following areas:

• Applicant characteristics;
• Program operations (including program characteristics and service delivery); and
• Participant outcomes (will be measured both at initiation of programservices (pre-test) and completion (post-test)).

To learn more and comment on the proposed peformance measures, please see the full article on the Federal Register detailing comment submission guidelines here.