Building Strong Families Project

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Strengthening and stabilizing the relationships of low-income couples has emerged as a focus of national policy development and testing. If unmarried parents can be helped to fulfill their aspirations for stable, healthy lives together, there could be important benefits for child well-being. Building Strong Families (BSF) is an initiative to develop and evaluate programs designed to help interested unwed parents achieve those goals. This website is designed to document the progress of the BSF project, the services being tested, and the results of the evaluation.

Strengthening Unmarried Parents’ Relationships: The Early Impacts of Building Strong Families

This report provides impacts of BSF on couples about 15 months after they applied for the program. Early impacts show that, when results are averaged across the eight individual programs included in the evaluation, BSF did not achieve its primary objective of improving the stability and quality of the couples’ relationships. Results varied across the eight programs with positive effects for one program and negative effects for another. Other programs had little or no effects on relationships. BSF had overall positive effects for African American couples—improving the quality of their relationships.

A response to an evaluation of the above report.

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