The Forever Initiative

The Forever Initiative

Food Forever Champions include leaders from governments, business, civil society and academia. Food Forever seeks to communicate the urgency of conserving and using agricultural biodiversity to new audiences.

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Thank you for your suscription to our monthly Crop Topics newsletter. Have a look at our Previous newsletters. Send Tweet Share Print. The Food Forever Initiative. Even married couples can benefit from refresher courses on how to express their emotions, how to handle financial stress and how to be better listeners, what Hawkins calls "micro dosages of marriage maintenance education that can stave off the forces of entropy in the world.

That entropy is seen in disheartening statistics like the 48 percent of all children who are born to single mothers, the nearly half of marriages destined to end in divorce, and the abuse rate of children in homes with cohabiting parents — they are more than three times more likely to be physically abused than children in homes with married biological parents.

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The poverty problem is complex and there's only so much money to go around. Each year, states have to decide where they want to allocate resources, with worthy options being after-school programs for underpriviledged kids, job programs for out-of-work parents, campaigns to reduce out-of-wedlock pregnancies or fatherhood education for incarcerated dads.

The federal government helps through TANF pronounced "tan-if" block grants, and in a review of states' TANF spending, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that among the states, there's a wide range of priorities and spending patterns. Eight states spent more than 15 percent of their TANF block grants on the goals of reducing out-of-wedlock pregnancy and helping form two-parent families.

In fact, he proposes that states pay for relationship education courses through TANF, rather than relying on limited federal grants or private donations.

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That's exactly what Utah did in when it established its marriage initiative, which quickly blossomed into the second-biggest program in the country, behind Oklahoma's. Utah's problem is not uncommon, because even though 1 percent is a relatively small amount of money, it's still coming from a limited pool, says LaDonna Pavetti, vice president for family income support policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

And there isn't evidence that shows those programs work, and that's sort of a pretty important piece of information. Healthy marriage and relationship education programs are relatively new social policy initiatives, and because of that, there are limited studies with mixed results.

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Unwed parents in the study met for group sessions where they learned about communication and conflict management, affection and trust, the transition to parenthood and parent-infant relationships. In addition, they received individual support from counselors and referral to education, employment, mental health, child care, housing or legal services in the community.

The study found that after 15 months of use in the eight sites, the Building Strong Families program made no impact on the couples' relationship quality or probability of marriage — except for the Oklahoma site, where couples reported higher relationship quality, better co-parenting, higher father involvement and increased family stability. Oklahoma leads the country with its TANF-funded healthy-marriage initiative and has reached , people over 13 years, said Kendy Cox, a director at the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative. Though families are still breaking down across the country, research indicates Oklahoma's efforts have acted somewhat like a brake.

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Since , 3 percent more children in Oklahoma live with two parents, 2. They also found that across the country, the states that spent more money per capita on marriage-strengthening initiatives had fewer out-of-wedlock births and fewer children living with single parents.