Sunday, January 11, 2009

A Joint Vision for Home Visiting

Five programs* that have developed nationally-recognized home visiting programs have expressed their shared vision for home visiting services.

It's encouraging to see their shared vision includes collaboration on advocacy:

Prevention services in general are underfunded and a low priority on our nation’s domestic policy agenda. The complexity and volume of need among families and young children in this nation far exceeds the capacity of any one of our programs. Therefore, we will work together to advocate for a greater investment in effective prevention programs for children and families.

Home visitation is a service delivery strategy that is essential to better support our country’s youngest children. We are unified in our view that building relationships with parents and children in their home environments is a uniquely valuable approach to nurturing parental competence and successful early childhood development. Together, we intend to make this type of service delivery practice more broadly accepted and a welcome and trusted approach in family development.

Helping society understand the value - the return on the social investment - created when these opportunities are available to new parents is essential to making the "resource pie" larger for all of these programs. It's even more important in these difficult economic times...

Resources

* Healthy Families America, Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters, Nurse-Family Partnership, Parents as Teachers, and The Parent-Child Home Program

RAND - The Economics of Early Childhood Policy: What the Dismal Science Has to Say
The fundamental insight of economics when comparing early childhood policies with other social investments is that a growing body of program evaluations ...
www.rand.org/pubs/occasional_papers/2008/RAND_OP227.pdf

National Home Visiting Services Shared Vision Statement
http://www.parentsasteachers.org/atf/cf/{00812ECA-A71B-4C2C-8FF3-8F16A5742EEA}/HV%20Shared%20Vision%20Statement.pdf

A Curriculum on Social Investment and Human Resources
http://salises.uwimona.edu.jm:1104/sa63f/Course%20Outline_63F.pdf

Heckman (Science, 2006) Skills Formation and the Economics of Investing in Disadvantaged Children
http://www.brainwave.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/valuing_prevention.pdf

Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank (2003)- "The Economics of Early Childhood Development: Lessons for Economic Policy"
http://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications_papers/pub_display.cfm?id=3351

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