Statewide Efforts to Promote Family Flourishing
The Texas Family Project encourages Texas leaders to adopt strategic and proactive family policies that will encourage and support healthy family formation across our state. We offer renewed frameworks and strategies that prioritize upstream preventive efforts to bolster marriages, empower fathers and mothers, and promote family flourishing across Texas.
There are three key ways for legislative and agency leaders to promote family flourishing:
Protect
Protecting families involves mounting short-term, reactive measures to confront the evolving threats to marriage and family in America. These efforts often galvanize popular support in response to urgent needs and seek to protect our most foundational institutions.
Promote
Promoting resilient families involves developing long-term, proactive strategies aimed at fostering healthy family formation. These efforts provide a high return on investment but are often overshadowed by more urgent (“protect”) issues. Efforts to strengthen families require a sustained and coordinated strategy that aligns efforts across agencies, prioritizes prevention, and fosters innovative solutions designed to stabilize and support vulnerable families.
Renew
Renewing policy for strong families involves revitalizing existing, but often neglected, efforts, statutes, and institutions, reinvigorating them with new vision, research, and resources to better serve Texas families. These efforts might include equipping family court judges with new methods and resources to ensure divorcing couples know how to best parent their children to minimize the impact of divorce, or to ensure that divorce-ambivalent couples are absolutely certain that divorce is their last and only option. This high-return-on-investment approach often bypasses complex legislative processes by reimagining existing efforts within state agencies.
One way the Texas Family Project is building a stronger Texas is by researching best-in-class, evidence based programs and policies to promote family flourishing and renew existing institutions:
Reimagining TANF Project
The Texas Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program has the potential to play a pivotal role in helping families achieve self-sufficiency, stability, and long-term economic independence. However, maximizing the program’s impact requires a comprehensive, coordinated strategy that aligns efforts across agencies, promotes prevention, and fosters innovative solutions. Reimagining TANF outlines key priorities for strengthening TANF in Texas, drawing on the most successful programs and best practices from across the country.
