The Office of Family Assistance (OFA) is forecasting to solicit grant proposals in February of 2025 for the Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood (HMRF) Grant (~$144 M).
We’ve assembled this page to help you start thinking about these grants and your organization’s approach to organizing a strong grant proposal.
Here’s a link to the 2020 Funding Opportunity Announcement. It may provide you some insights as to the coming grant.
There are three grant types in this forecast: Relationships, Education, Advancement, and Development for Youth for Life (READY4Life) (~$23M), FRAMEWorks (~$34M), and Fatherhood FIRE (~$57M).
READY4Life projects are targeted exclusively to youth (9th grade and up to age 25), for projects designed to support healthy relationships and marriage. The Dibble Institute is dedicated to your success as an applicant!
Love Notes, Relationship Smarts PLUS, Mind Matters, and Money Habitudes will help you successfully meet the grant’s critical components:
- Communication skills
- Conflict resolution, management, and problem-solving skills
- Knowledge of the benefits of marriage
- Stress and anger management
- Expression and discussion of negotiation skills
- Financial Literacy
- Parenting skills (as applicable)
- Trauma and its effects on forming healthy relationships
Plus you will have the entire Dibble team supporting you to make your program a success! Email Grants@DibbleInstitute.org with any grant-related questions.
*Forecasted amount. Values are subject to change.
Program Overview
Love Notes: Relationship Skills for Love, Life, and Work
Love Notes covers all four required topic areas and three optional ones from the grant application.
For a growing number of young adults (14-24), unplanned pregnancy, single parenting, and troubled relationships derail personal goals. Love Notes 3.0 was created for this vulnerable audience, including young parents. In 12 hours, they discover—often for the first time—how to make wise choices about relationships, sexuality, pregnancy, partnering, and more. Version 3.0 includes brand new content important to today’s youth, including sexual consent, sexual assault, cyber bullying, online porn, sexting, drugs & alcohol – and their impact on relationships.
Rather than focusing on what to avoid, Love Notes builds positive skills and appeals to aspirations. It offers young people new conceptual frameworks, including the Success Sequence, to help them make informed decisions instead of sliding into unplanned choices that can derail their lives.
Love Notes is listed as an Evidence Based Program with the Office of Population Affairs
What People are Saying about Love Notes:
With this group, it helps us stay in school, helps us open our eyes to healthy relationships. It helps us get what we need to grow in ourselves, and also grow in our families, and grow in our children. And also, like I don’t know, it gives us hope!
~Parenting Teen in Texas taking the Love Notes class
Relationship Smarts PLUS
Relationship Smarts PLUS covers all four required topic areas and three optional ones from the grant application.
Relationship Smarts PLUS 5.0 Classic is designed to help teens (14-18) learn how to make wise choices about relationships, dating, partners, sex, and more.
This 12 hour curriculum uses popular media and lively activities to engage both males and females in learning. Key topics include:
- Self-awareness: Personal strengths/weaknesses, past influences, goal setting, friendship, peer pressure, maturity, clarifying values, self-regulation.
- Developing healthy relationships: Attraction, building blocks of positive relationships, how to assess relationships, realistic love, low-risk dating, “deciding vs. sliding.”
- Problems, warnings, and dangerous relationships: Break-ups and broken hearts, unhealthy and abusive behaviors, ways to exit safely, boundaries, dating violence, sexual assault.
- Communication and conflict: Danger signs, time outs, anger regulation, the Speaker-Listener Technique, problem-solving.
- Intimacy and sexual decisions: Pacing relationships, what intimacy means, sex in the context of relationships, boundaries, myths of pregnancy, risky situations, and sexual consent, refusal skills, how unplanned pregnancy affects a child.
- Updates to the Success Sequence: how the order of school, commitment, and babies impacts your future
- Social media: The impact of “constant connection,” sexting realities and risks, online porn, personal polices on using social media.
Its content is delivered through activities that are informative, fun, and affirmative. The student workbook helps teens apply curriculum concepts to their own lives. Parent-Teen activities for each lesson stimulate conversations and connections with trusted adults.
What People are Saying About Relationship Smarts PLUS:
Teens need this program and they need you to help them make it work in their lives. No other program that I have seen challenges teens to confront their feelings, their decisions and their behaviors as thoroughly as [Relationship Smarts].~ Meg Meeker, M.D, Author
Mind Matters: Overcoming Adversity and Building Resilience
(Mind Matters can help you address the 9th topic area from the grant application “Trauma and its effects on forming healthy relationships (as applicable.”) To see how you teaching the program might look in a one-on-one setting, watch this Mind Matter’s Lesson on our YouTube Channel.
People experiencing trauma and toxic stress often have difficulty regulating their emotional responses when facing challenges in school, life, relationships and family settings.
Mind Matters’ lessons and activities teach people skills to respond to negative experiences with innovative methods based on current research and neuroscience. These practices give individuals a way to take charge of their emotions and improve their states of mind. Participants learn to address their physical, relational, and mental health needs.
Mind Matters’ practical, hands-on lessons explore the effects of trauma along with the healing process. Each lesson includes activities that build resilience and increase hope.
Mind Matters addresses the following topics:
- Self-Soothing and Regulating Emotions: Cultivate a mindfulness practice
- Managing Stress Effectively: Learn to deal with intrusive thoughts
- Developing Empathy: Improve interpersonal communications
- Creating a Code of Honor: Develop a life of intention
- Building and Using a Support System: Learn how to ask for help
The skills taught in Mind Matters are designed to be practiced over a lifetime. The curriculum is not meant to be therapy or to replace psychotherapy. Rather, it is intended to be facilitated by paraprofessionals to inspire, uplift, and set people on the journey of healing as they cultivate deeper resilience.
What people are saying about Mind Matters:
We reviewed multiple curriculum options that addressed increasing emotional coping and resilience skills and felt this to be the easiest to use for instructors from various backgrounds, was evidence informed, and encompassed most of the objectives we were looking for.~Director
Money Habitudes
For most people, spending behaviors reflect unconscious habits and attitudes that were acquired young and persist regardless of financial savvy or economic status. Money Habitudes® explores this phenomenon, and serves as an important, non-technical addition to standard financial literacy programs.
We offer two versions of Money Habitudes® to meet your program’s needs:
What People are Saying About Money Habitudes:
Money Habitudes® delivers! This Guide does not promise students a high credit score or perfect relationship, but it will help them lower, or better yet abandon, money stressors that are rooted in childhood and lurk as future anxieties and relationship destroyers. As such, it goes beyond the numbers—a necessary place to build real financial security.
~ Lois A. Vitt, Ph.D., Founding Director, Institute for Socio-Financial Studies
Grant Aids
Take a look at these Case Studies to give you background, practical strategies, and tips for developing your grant program.
Healthy Marriage
Goal: Build Healthy Relationships
Funding: Healthy Marriage Grant, OFA
Setting: Resource Centers classrooms
Curriculum: Love Notes 3.0
Goal: Leadership and employability skills
Funding: Administration for Children and Families
Setting: Job Corp Leadership Class
Curriculum: Love Notes and Money Habitudes
Goal: Increase relationship knowledge and skills in youth
Funding: Private
Setting: 9th grade Health Classes
Curriculum: Love Notes 3.0
Goal: Increase knowledge of healthy relationships
Funding: Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood (OFA)
Setting: Reservation high school and YFS center
Curriculum: Relationship Smarts Plus
Goal: Address trauma in schools
Funding: School budget
Setting: High school classrooms, health & FCS
Curriculum: Mind Matters
Responsible Fatherhood
Goal: Increase father involvement and connections to workforce
Funding: Responsible Fatherhood grant, OFA
Setting: Community centers, libraries, churches
Curriculum: Love Notes
Goal: Increase father child connection
Funding: Responsible Fatherhood grant, OFA
Setting: Reentry rehab centers, community centers, churches
Curriculum: Love Notes
Goal: Increase understanding of healthy relationships
Funding: County funding First 5
Setting: Conservation Corp classroom
Curriculum: Love Notes
Take a look at these Webinars to give you background, practical strategies, and tips for developing your grant program.
Love Notes
Relationship Smarts PLUS
Mind Matters
Money Habitudes