Survey Participants needed / PREP Military Outcomes / ACF Grants Update - 6/ 26/11

[Smartmarriages]

- PARTICIPANTS NEEDED FOR LOVE & MARRIAGE RESEARCH
- UNEMPLOYMENT AND MARRIAGE SURVEY
- Marriage skills education cuts military divorce by 2/3 in blind test
- NARME GRANTS UPDATE

________________________________

- PARTICIPANTS NEEDED FOR LOVE & MARRIAGE RESEARCH
You are invited to take part in a research study on Love & Marriage
conducted for John Van Epp¹s Love Thinks, LLC. If you are married, then you
are eligible to participate. The survey takes approximately 15 minutes to
complete and participants are entered to win a $100 gift card to Amazon.
 
To participate please visit: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/loveandmarriage
Thank you for your time and participation in this important study.
 
Questions: M. Cutlip
vaneppmc at yahoo.com
330-304-7653
 
 ________________________________________
- UNEMPLOYMENT AND MARRIAGE SURVEY
This researcher needs more respondents. Please forward this to anyone who
might be able to help.

ARE YOU OR YOUR SPOUSE OUT OF WORK?  Participants Needed!

I am seeking married people from a variety of backgrounds to complete a
brief online questionnaire on how unemployment impacts their marital quality
in the current economy.

It should take about 10-20 minutes for you to complete.
Your participation and your responses will be kept confidential.

Please go to:
www.tinyurl.com/unemployment-marriage

Questions?  Contact Andrew Bland, M.A.: abland3 at indstate.edu

---------------------
- Marriage skills education cuts military divorce by 2/3 in blind test

June 21, 2011
John Crouch 
FamilyLaw.TypePad.com
Randomized study demonstrates divorce reduction of 2/3 for military couples
receiving marriage education.  
Unlike many studies of marriage education, and indeed of almost any other
kind of education or counseling for any kind of social behavior, this study
was able to have a control group that did not take the classes, AND to
randomly assign couples between the control  group and the group that took
marriage education, specifically "PREP for Strong Bonds" delivered by Army
chaplains. One year later, 2% of the marriage-educated group divorced and 6%
of the control group divorced.

This is not the first study using randomly-assigned control groups - earlier
studies have likewise found that what's most effective for couples is
curricula which are professionally developed, but which are delivered within
a particular group, whether religious, ethnic or occupational. 

- NARME GRANTS UPDATE
Update on ACF Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood Grant
Opportunities from NARME:

On April 1, 2011, the Administration for Children and Families (ACF)
released information that they were planning to release six different
Healthy Marriage (HM) and Responsible Fatherhood (RF) Funding Opportunities
Announcements (FOAs) ­ with an expected release date of June 14, 2011. Three
of those FOAs were to fund HM activities and three were to fund RF
activities, with the total funding of $117.5 million per year to be evenly
split between the HM and the RF opportunities.

June 14th has come and gone without any of those FOAs being released. Since
then, we at NARME have received numerous inquiries from our members asking
for any information that we might have about what is going on and asking for
our opinion about ³what does the delay mean?²

The truth is that we do not know what the delay means, and we don¹t want to
speculate. However this is what we do know:
€ As of today, June 22nd, two of the three expected HM grants and one of the
RF grants, have been canceled. The grants that have been canceled are:
o Field-Initiated Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education Grants ($28
million)
o Field-Initiated Responsible Fatherhood Grants ($28 million)
o Community-Centered Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education Strategies
for Ex-Prisoners ($3 million).

The total previously forecasted funding level of the above three grants was
$59 million.
€ As of today, June 22nd, the following three grant opportunities (totaling
$58.5 million) have not yet been cancelled, and we hope to see FOAs released
for them sometime ³soon²:
o Community-Centered Healthy Marriage and Relationship Education Grants ($28
million)
o Pathways to Responsible Fatherhood Grants ($28 million)
o Community-Centered Responsible Fatherhood Strategies for Re-entering or
Recently Released Fathers ($2.5 million).

Here is a sample response we have received when we have asked various ACF
personnel about the status of these grants: ³The Healthy Marriage and
Responsible Fatherhood synopses posted to HHS Forecast website
http://www.acf.hhs.gov/hhsgrantsforecast/ provide general notification and
brief descriptions of the funding opportunities that the agency intends to
publish. The information contained in the HHS Forecast system is subject to
change. We do not have any further information related to the other FOAs or
when they will be published. Please continue to monitor the above-mentioned
website for latest developments.²

We will continue to provide NARME members with new information about these
grant opportunities as they become available. In addition, you can click on
the ³Latest Update on Federal Grants² link on the NARME website at any time
to read the current information that we have.  http://www.narme.org/portal/

__________________________________________
- FOR INFORMATION about how to post to the Smart Marriages® newslist;
subscribe or UNSUBSCRIBE, or an archive of all past posts:
http://www.smartmarriages.com/newslist.info.html




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists101.his.com/pipermail/smartmarriages/attachments/20110626/f1a6cf00/attachment.html>