The goal of the Partners for Fragile Families initiative is to help low-income fathers share the legal, financial and emotional responsibilities of parenthood with the mothers of their children. We call the process "team parenting." Improving the interaction between the child support enforcement system and fathers of fragile families is a critical step in this process. One of our primary strategies is a series of Peer Learning Workshops for child support enforcement professionals, to encourage, support and assist those agencies that are addressing the special problems that fathers in fragile families present to the child support enforcement system. The purpose of the Peer Learning Workshop is to help children support enforcement officials:

• Establish the state of the art in programming related to child support enforcement and low-income fathers in fragile families.
• Isolate the salient aspects of these efforts for examination.
• Identify current systematic and policy barriers to effective child support enforcement for fathers in fragile families.
• Identify possible points of intervention for work with fathers to have them establish paternity and stay involved in their children’s lives.
• Identify strategies for developing orders responsive to the situation of low-income obligors and for effecting appropriate order modification.
• Develop strategies for cross-agency collaboration.
• Learn to work with community-based organizations.

Peer Learning Workshops operate at the national, regional and local levels. The national level focuses on policy issues and systematic barriers to working with fathers in fragile families, reinforcement of child support enforcement work with fathers in fragile families. Participation at this level is by invitation. Regional Peer Leaning Workshops are oriented more toward "nuts and bolts," emphasizing operational issues and partnership development. Local Workshops further emphasize partnership development, identification of non-traditional partners and action plans.

Peer Learning Workshops will serve as reinforcement to child support enforcement pioneers in the field of working with low-income fathers, and will encourage them to experiment with new approaches. They will help other public and private agencies to see how they can include fathers in the families they are mandated to serve. They will help academics focus their research on this difficult-to locate population of men. They will help politicians by providing them with knowledge of what child support and other programs have done and what needs to be done for fragile families. National Peer Learning Workshops will produce reports of information exchanged and policy issues identified, as well as issue papers for use by the field.