How to Use the Course
This course, Welfare Reform for Addiction Professionals, is a companion course to Understanding Child Welfare: A Guide for Addiction Professionals. Although you can take these two courses in either order, we recommend that you take this course on welfare reform first.
This online course is more than a primer on welfare-to-work issues for addiction professionals. It is designed to help you to understand what types of services, options, and cash assistance programs are available to your clients. You will learn that the Federal Government issued core requirements for the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program and that each State has developed unique responses to these requirements.
Since each State has a different approach to TANF, this course will provide you with the information and tools that will help you find out what is available in your State. If you want to truly understand how to help your clients obtain access to TANF services and thus meet their treatment needs, you will have to do some homework once you finish the course. To help you, we have developed worksheets designed to gather information and document the availability of your State's services and to monitor your clients' progress through the welfare-to-work system. We recommend that you print out the factsheets and worksheets and use them once you have completed the course.
The exhibits and worksheets are prepared in a format that is viewable and printable using Adobe Acrobat Reader. The Adobe Acrobat Reader can be downloaded free of charge.
