From the Capitol to Your Community Report

DECEMBER 2025

From the Capitol to Your Community Insights on Family Well-Being in Texas

Presented By:

Executive Summary In 2025, TexProtects held seven From the Capitol to Your Community convenings, which engaged 226 participants across the Texas Panhandle, Hill Country, Gulf Coast, Northeast, Southeast, North Texas and Rio Grande Valley.

These events served as a forum for local partners, advocates and community leaders to discuss the challenges facing families and identify local and statewide solutions.

The convenings revealed that families across the state are struggling to meet their basic needs due to persistent financial hardship, rising costs of living and lack of affordable essential services. These convenings also illuminated innovative, collaborative and community-driven strategies to strengthen family well-being as a powerful foundation for systems and policy change. This report details these challenges, the impacts of recent federal funding shifts and the community-proposed solutions necessary to create a more resilient and accessible service system for all Texas families.

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Core Challenges Facing Texas Families Insights from the convenings reveal Texas families are presenting with increasingly complex needs that require solutions and services spanning multiple state agencies and systems. Family needs span a spectrum from basic supports like childcare and housing, to crucial non-medical drivers of health such as transportation, which can limit a family's ability to thrive and, if unaddressed, often escalate into crisis situations.

Economic Strain & Basic Needs Instability High Cost of Living

Job & Income Loss

Technology Gaps

Persistent issues include housing instability, high costs for childcare and food insecurity (exacerbated by cuts to programs like SNAP and WIC).

Families often have low wages and limited access to paid leave. With many key services only accessible during the workday, parents can lose income when seeking support.

Lack of reliable internet access, computers and general technology literacy creates a significant hurdle for applying for benefits and accessing remote services.

Mental Health & Access Barriers Stress & Trauma

Transportation Constraints

Families are financially, mentally and emotionally stretched and stressed, which contributes to a subsequent rise in mental health struggles for all household members.

In both large cities and rural areas, transportation barriers are a major obstacle, restricting access to jobs, healthcare and other necessary services.

Lack of Specialized Care Communities report severe shortages in specialized care, including pediatric psychiatry and services for individuals with substance use disorders, often with no funding or online options available.

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Barriers to Services & Kinship Care Fragmented Systems Services are difficult to navigate due to complex, inconsistent or non-communicating systems across agencies like DFPS, DSHS, HHSC and local partners, creating confusion, duplication of effort and a lack of a clear roadmap for families in need.

Lack of Resource Awareness A widespread issue is the lack of knowledge about existing resources. It is challenging for both families and sometimes even providers to know what services are available in their own community.

Stigma, Fear & Distrust Cultural stigma, fears of family separation and a sense of helplessness often prevent families from asking for help. A lack of trust deters families from seeking support or engaging with essential community services.

Kinship Hurdles Informal kinship caregivers provide crucial support to children who aren't in CPS custody but lack the legal authority needed to make critical decisions on their behalf. The instability of funding for connectors, like Kinship Navigators, compounds this issue.

Systemic Barriers & Inefficiencies The convenings highlighted that the greatest obstacles to family stability are often administrative, rooted in complex, outdated and rigid systems that create significant burdens for both families seeking help and the organizations providing it.

Burdensome Access & Application Processes No Universal Access Point Families lack a single, clear pipeline or central hub to access the wide array of services available.

While many different kinds of connectors exist, administrative barriers and technology needs prevent some (like 2-1-1) from operating efficiently. Furthermore, there are not enough accessible "front doors" (like Family Resource Centers or Kinship Navigators) consistently available in every community.

Excessive Paperwork The application process for benefits is consistently described as burdensome due to excessive paperwork, inconsistent eligibility requirements across programs and the lack of a universal common application form.

Outdated Technology State-level systems, data-sharing protocols and referral lists are often disjointed or outdated.

Websites are not user-friendly, and critical benefit application portals (like those for SNAP/Medicaid) frequently crash during use.

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Constraints on Providers Workforce Capacity & Pay Inconsistent training, staff burnout and high turnover severely impact service quality and result in the loss of institutional knowledge. Because families are presenting with increasingly complex needs that require solutions spanning multiple agencies, there is an urgent need for cross-systems training and support for staff. This training is essential for helping staff better understand what services are available for their clients and offered by other agencies. Providers also noted that grant funding often restricts them from offering a fair wage or covering flexible operational costs.

Contracting Constraints Every state agency, and even divisions within the same state agency, have unique, complex and inefficient contracting procedures. This reality makes grant and program management overly complex, taking time away from direct service to families.

Siloed Service Delivery The siloed structure of state agencies and programs leads to fragmented and overly complicated approaches to serving families, rather than fostering strategies that support families as a unit or a whole-child approach.

Impact of Federal Changes Service Cuts Reductions or eliminations to foundational safety net programs — including SNAP, WIC, TANF, Medicaid and HUD — immediately reduce critical family supports, pushing more families into crisis.

Capacity Loss Reduction in funding has led directly to program closures and staff layoffs statewide, significantly lowering the overall capacity for service delivery.

Increased Competition Agencies are responding by competing more aggressively for private donations and submitting more grant applications. However, local philanthropic foundations are overwhelmed with record funding requests and are not able to fill the gaps left by federal funding cuts. Restrictive grants that cannot be used for operating costs further limit the ability to maintain infrastructure.

Community Response Despite these financial challenges, local communities are demonstrating innovative resilience, doing what they can with strained and limited resources to prevent family supports from collapsing: Organizations developing new, creative partnerships and programming to fill gaps in basic services.

Churches and community anchors are stepping up to offer food banks and free workshops, highlighting the vital role of local institutions in buffering the impact of state and federal reductions, even as their own resources are stretched thin.

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Collaboration & Community Strengths Despite systemic barriers, local communities across Texas demonstrate innovative strategies for connecting families and supporting well-being. These local assets provide the essential foundation for effective statewide reform.

Existing Strengths & Assets

Key Community Anchors

Local schools, faith communities, nonprofits and philanthropy serve as trusted anchors, often functioning as one-stopshops and distribution sites for basic necessities and critical referrals.

Culture of Collaboration

Formal Connectors

Strong formal and informal networks exist, including Family Resource Centers (FRCs), the 2-1-1 helpline and Help Me Grow (HMG) initiatives, which are central to making warm handoffs between partners.

Communities describe a highly collaborative environment with strong coalitions, formal MOUs and a genuine willingness among organizations to work together, co-locate services and use shared referral processes.

No Universal Access Point

Opportunities for Growth The primary challenge is not the existence of collaboration, but its consistency and reach: Training & Data: There is an urgent need for consistent training across all communities to ensure that families know how to access services, when families should be connected or referred to help and/or when a report of abuse or neglect needs to be made. This includes a demand for cross-systems training to help professionals (such as childcare educators, home visitors and healthcare providers) better understand what services their respective partner systems offer to the families they serve.

Marketing & Awareness: Many critical resources are not well-known or marketed, leading to a disconnect where services exist but families remain unaware or are afraid to ask for help.

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Proposed & Emerging Solutions The convenings culminated in a clear set of action-oriented solutions and proposals to improve the systems that support families across Texas. Many of these recommendations can directly be addressed through the Sunset Review process, offering pathways to modernize and improve state agency function.

Address Systems Fragmentation The most urgent need is to eliminate the current fragmentation across and within familyserving systems and agencies. Investment is required to ensure that all existing resource connectors (such as 2-1-1 and local resource centers) are interconnected in order to provide families with accurate, up-to-date information. This system-wide coordination must be supported by cross-systems training for staff to better understand what services are available for their clients and offered by other agencies. To ensure alignment and support for critical state services, the connectors should be housed under a single agency, which would help ensure they align with and support HHSC programs to which families need to be connected. Collaboration within these connectors must be met with the authority to take actionable steps, as well as rewarding shared outcomes and fostering a single, unified approach to family well-being.

Eliminate Administrative Burdens Administrative complexity creates unnecessary hurdles for families and providers alike. One way to eliminate these burdens is by creating a universal intake form and a shared application process across and within state agencies. This change will streamline eligibility for families and relieve the burden on state employees currently processing duplicate applications.

Investment in Family Supports & Non-Medical Drivers of Health Strategic, direct investment is essential to address the core challenges of parental stress and family instability. This includes expanding critical and proven programs, including home visiting and affordable quality childcare. Oversight authority must also be given to coordinate all children's mental health services and supports, including children ages 0-3, that support families early on and prevent subsequent crisis and/or behavioral issues in the future. The system must also invest in informal kinship support, specifically by removing financial barriers for informal caregivers to obtain legal authority for decision-making, while providing sustained funding for necessary support services. Complementary to these proposals, there must be investment in the workforce by providing adequate staffing and support; training to ensure providers know what resources exist in their communities to meet families' needs; and implementing two-generational strategies and trauma-informed practices that address parental stress to strengthen outcomes for families. Finally, investments in non-medical divers of health, including transportation and food access, as well as innovative approaches to serving families within their own communities, such as kinship navigators and/or mobile Family Resource Centers, are critical to family well-being.

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About TexProtects TexProtects is a state-level nonprofit focused on the prevention of child abuse and neglect through advocacy, awareness, and collaboration. The organization advances policies and system changes that strengthen families, raises awareness of evidence-based prevention solutions, and supports professionals in delivering effective programs. Additionally, TexProtects works to connect families and communities to essential resources while convening partners and allies to build a strong, statewide prevention ecosystem.

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