Home Visiting in Washington
Home visiting is a voluntary, proven way to support and strengthen families in the first years of life. Trained home visitors and parents develop trusting relationships and work together over several years to address prenatal and infant care, child development and parenting skills. Home visitors also ensure coordination and referrals to other valuable resources and community services. It is a multi-generational approach that has the power to positively change the trajectory of an entire family.
Research shows home visiting programs increase positive parent-child interaction, support early detection of developmental delays, improve school readiness and increase high school graduation rates. In addition, home visiting programs increase positive birth outcomes for children, improve the likelihood that families have a primary care physician and decrease rates of child abuse and neglect. Our goal is to ensure families across Washington state have equitable access to personalized, high quality home-based services that support their child’s healthy growth and development and positive parent-child relationship.
Start Early Washington
We inform systems, drive innovation, support the workforce and advocate for children and families to ensure high quality implementation of prenatal and early learning services to achieve the strongest outcomes for families in Washington state. Working in concert with the Department of Children, Youth and Families and other public and private funders, Start Early Washington supports new and existing home visiting programs with coaching, consultation, training and professional learning.
Start Early Washington’s home visiting team includes experts in home visiting, family engagement, program implementation and community service coordination. Grounded in a strengths-based approach, our team supports new and experienced home visiting programs through the following services:
We work with communities interested in starting up a new home visiting program and facilitating a community-driven and collaborative decision-making process. Home visiting exploration brings together key community partners, including families, to consider the benefits of home visiting and assess readiness and fit with existing services.
We provide ongoing technical assistance to individual home visiting supervisors, consulting on specific home visiting implementation questions, collaboratively exploring solutions to challenges and promoting connections with other resources. Supports are individually tailored based on the program’s model, funder and years of experience with home visiting.
We facilitate group discussion opportunities for home visitors and supervisors across Washington state, leveraging the collective knowledge of the home visiting workforce to facilitate peer-to-peer learning, reflection and networking.
We provide access to tools and resources that measurably improve program goals and ensure the highest quality service delivery. Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) supports include customized, individual coaching through a specific project, with opportunities to review emerging lessons learned across programs. Integrating CQI tools and frameworks improves quality and outcomes over time.
We house state model leads for Nurse-Family Partnership, Parents as Teachers and ParentChild+ models of home visiting. With many years of expertise in home visiting, model leads support home visiting programs to implement evidence-based home visiting models with fidelity.
The Community Advisory Committee (CAC) will support Start Early Washington by providing guidance, insights, and strategic advice on our programmatic and policy efforts. This will include things like new home visiting models, innovations and improvements to existing models, strategies to effectively meet the needs of communities beyond home visiting and expanding support to the early learning workforce. While Start Early Washington has historically focused our program work on home visiting practices, we are intentionally broadening the focus of this advisory committee’s scope to include the early learning systems that support families with young children. This inaugural community advisory committee will provide an opportunity for Start Early Washington to gain insight into the experiences of families in Washington and help us in identifying policy priorities. Our goal is to create a community with common goals and interests, and we highly encourage “outside of the box” thinking!
