For the Strengthening Relationship Education and Marriage Services (STREAMS) evaluation, the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), in partnership with Mathematica and Public Strategies, studied healthy marriage and relationship education programs in five states: Georgia, Colorado, Texas, Florida, and Missouri. The evaluation revealed important lessons on topics like getting started with healthy marriage and relationship education programming, implementing effective recruitment strategies, delivering high quality programming, engaging participants, and integrating services to promote employment stability with healthy marriage and relationship education programming. Details on the STREAMS evaluation and the experiences of these programs can be found in the following online resources:
- Implementation of two versions of Relationship Smarts PLUS (Georgia)
- MotherWise: Implementation of a healthy marriage and relationship education program for pregnant and new mothers (Colorado)
- Empowering Families: Implementation of an integrated HMRE, employment, and financial literacy program for low-income couples (Texas)
- Implementation of Career STREAMS: An integrated employment and healthy relationship program for youth adults (Missouri)
- ELEVATE: Implementation of a healthy marriage and relationship education program by a statewide cooperative extension services (Florida)
In September 2020, ACF announced 55 new grant awards to organizations in 21 states as part of the Healthy Marriage grant programs. Each grantee received a five-year award to provide community-based programming designed to promote healthy marriages and healthy relationships. The resources ACF offers from the STREAMS evaluation can help these grantees learn from the experiences of other grantees who also designed and implemented healthy marriage and relationship education programs.
Findings from an accompanying impact study of the five programs in the STREAMS evaluation are scheduled to be released starting in 2021.
