Presenters: Louise Hayes, Community Legal Services and Peter Zurflieh, Community Justice Project

2020 PLAN Virtual Statewide Conference

DHS spent over a year working on a redesign of its TANF and SNAP E & T programs. Basically, these changes abandon the "work first" approach, and it's emphasis on rapid attachment to the work force, and instead focus on assessment, barrier removal, and education/training. Most of these changes are being implemented through modifications to the contracts with EARN programs. In addition, the Work Ready program has been repurposed to focus solely on Extended TANF families. These changes went into effect on July 1, 2020. In this session we will talk in more detail about the programmatic changes as well as various E & T policy changes intended to facilitate the revamp. The COVID pandemic has impacted both the ability of clients to participate in E & T activities and the manner in which they participate. E & T providers are attempting to serve clients remotely, which raises numerous issues that we will explore in the session.