To help families meet their children’s basic needs, Congress expanded the Child Tax Credit (CTC) for 2021. Families will receive $3,600 per child up to age 5 and $3,00 per child 6 to 17, half of which is paid out in monthly checks. If you haven’t filed taxes recently, you can use the new, simplified CTC Non-Filer Sign Up Tool to sign up.
The CTC reached 59.3 million children and reduced child poverty in July by 25 percent. If every eligible child had received the benefit, the CTC would have reduced child poverty by about 40 percent.
Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) is a key economic support program to help families with children who have very low incomes through a variety of services. TANF marks 25 years in August 2021, a landmark which invites both reflection and reckoning.
Institutional racism disproportionately denies Black, Latinx, and Indigenous children access to healthy food at home and in their communities.
The American Rescue Plan includes a significant, one-year expansion to the Child Tax Credit (CTC). Millions of newly eligible children and their families will benefit from this major expansion, and successful implementation is now key to realizing a significant reduction in child poverty, building racial equity, and creating a public investment for the good of all children. Here’s what you need to know about the expanded CTC.
To help families meet their children’s basic needs, Congress expanded the Child Tax Credit (CTC) for 2021. Families will receive $3,600 per child up to age 5 and $3,00 per child 6 to 17, half of which is paid out in monthly checks. If you haven’t filed taxes recently, you can use the CTC Non-Filer Sign Up Tool to sign up.
With one in three foster youth identifying as LGBTQ+ and reporting abysmal treatment and outcomes, and LGBTQ+ families also facing inequitable barriers in child welfare services, we stand at a crisis point that requires urgent action by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
All students deserve access to an education that prepares them to succeed in college, career, and life and to fully exercise their social, political, and economic rights. Attempting to gag educators and whitewash the aspects of U.S. history that rightfully make people uncomfortable undermines that basic principle.
Federal rental assistance is a set of several programs—mostly administered through the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Department of Agriculture with support from tax credits— that help families with little or no income cover their housing costs. These programs help in many different ways, but the basic concept is that families with low incomes contribute a certain, sustainable amount of their income to their monthly rent payments and the government covers the rest. In total, these programs help more than 9 million people in 4.6 million households, more than a third of which were households with children.
Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) is a federal block grant program for states, tribes, and territories designed to help families with a variety of services. States receive the block grant funding and use it to administer programs that provide cash assistance, child care, work supports and activities, child welfare, and more. States also use the funding to help families with children experiencing poverty pay for groceries, rent, diapers, clothing, and other basic necessities. In Fiscal Year 2020, which spans from October 2019 – September 2020, more than 1 million families—including more than 2 million children—received TANF assistance.