HHS Office of Child Support Enforcement Grant - Partnership Opportunity with IV-D agencies

The Office of Child Support Enforcement just published a notice for what they call their 1115 grants. This specific RFP is to address the immediate needs of the IV-D programs because of the economic downturn:

http://www.acf.hhs.gov/grants/open/HHS-2009-ACF-OCSE-FD-0095.html

Please see the language under the section Establishing or Enhancing Partnerships - one bullet point is "Using partnerships and collaborations with organizations that develop online legal information, automated forms, and other systems to improve the process and experience for those who represent themselves (pro se)."

Glenn Rawdon at LSC learned about this opportunity at a July 21 meeting of the National Judicial Child Support Taskforce. It is made up of HHS people in DC, judges from around the country, and state child support directors. There were about 30 people in all, including Vicki Turetsky, the new Commissioner of the Office of Child Support Enforcement who used to be with legal aid and who comes to OCSE from CLASP.

While Legal Aid programs are not eligible for direct grants, they could approach their state IV-D programs about putting in grant applications to enhance online CLE on child support and to automate forms, particularly for review and modification. According to Glenn, OCSE is very interested in that. As partners, legal aid programs could contribute space on the Statewide Websites and the HotDocs and A2J tools to create the forms. Then the OCSE grant money can be used to generate the content and produce the forms which would be accessible on the Statewide Websites.

There is a quick turnaround for this grant RFP - please note that the deadline for applications is August 24.