Key Findings:

• The four programs most frequently funded in states by MIECHV were:
  1.  Early Head Start – Home Based Program Option
  2. Healthy Families America
  3. Nurse-Family Partnership and
  4. Parents as Teachers.
• Mother served by MIECHV-funded programs have many and various needs
  • 92% were receiving some form of public assistance
  • 30% had symptoms of depression
  • Almost 20% had health problems that limited their activities
  • More than 75% had no more than a high school diploma
  • 10% reported being the victim of intimate partner violence

Research Snapshot
Executive Summary
Full Report to Congress

Early childhood home visiting programs typically target pregnant women and mothers of young children, but some programs have begun including fathers as well. The study aimed to understand how home visiting programs engage fathers, what fathers’ experiences are in those programs, and the perceived benefits of fathers’ participation. Qualitative interviews were conducted with home visiting program administrators, staff members, and participating fathers and mothers in five programs implementing strategies to engage fathers in home visiting services.

Brief: Engaging Low-Income Fathers in Home Visiting
Full Report: Approaches to Father Engagement and Fathers’ Experiences in Home Visiting Programs

Home Visiting Programs: An Early Test for the 114th Congress

Interviews with 22 states and tribal organizations revealed the breadth of innovation and success across the country as a result of MIECHV funding, including the:

• Expansion of evidence-based home visiting to serve more vulnerable children and families in high-risk communities and keep them engaged in the programs.
• Establishment of systems within home visiting communities and across services that support children and families, ensuring that families receive the best services to meet their needs.
• Provision of systemic training, technical assistance, and professional development to support the home visiting workforce.
• Creation of data collection systems, allowing grantees to analyze, evaluate, and report on data to demonstrate achieved child and family outcomes and improve program quality.
• Coordination amongst home visiting and other early childhood programs as well as the creation of centralized intake systems, which are collaborative approaches to engaging, recruiting, and enrolling families in home visiting programs across programs and organizations.
• Use of promising practices and other innovations in order to better serve at-risk populations with unmet needs.

Executive Summary

State Profiles

Full Report

Description from OPRE:
The legislation which established the Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program requires that grantees demonstrate measurable improvement in at least four of six benchmark domains.  HHS identified a list of constructs that grantees were required to measure within each benchmark domain and gave grantees the flexibility to develop their own performance measures for each construct.  This flexibility allowed grantees to develop performance measures that were meaningful for their specific programs.

These two documents summarize the benchmark measures selected by grantees.

• The Summary of Benchmark Measures Selected by Grantees provides an overarching narrative summary of the measures that grantees have selected within each benchmark construct area.
• The Snapshot Reports of Benchmark Measures Selected by Grantees provides brief snapshot reports of how grantees are defining and measuring each benchmark construct.

Click here for reports page at OPRE at ACF (HHS)Link: Summary of Benchmark Measures Selected by MIECHV Grantees (PDF)
Link: Snapshot Reports of Benchmark Measures Selected by Grantees (PDF)

1. Support implementation with fidelity to the home visiting program models
2. Support scale-up of the home visiting models—replicating the program model in a new service area, adapting the model for a new target population, or increasing the enrollment capacity in an existing service area
3. Support sustainability of the home visiting model beyond the end of the funding period

Mathematica Policy Research and its partner, Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago, conducted a national cross-site evaluation of the Supporting Evidence-Based Home Visiting to Prevent Child Maltreatment (EBHV) initiative. Using a mixed-methods approach, the national cross-site evaluation was designed to (1) examine the degree to which system change occurred, (2) document the fidelity with which the program models were implemented, and (3) identify implementation strategies and challenges.

Mathematica and Chapin Hall – Making Replication Work: Building Infrastructure to Implement, Scale-up, and Sustain Evidence-Based Early Childhood Home Visiting Programs with Fidelity
Synopsis
Full Report

The Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program (MIECHV) is a federal and state partnership that supports family- and child-related home visiting programs in every state. MIECHV targets high-risk families who are most likely to benefit from intensive home visiting services, through which trained professionals (often nurses, social workers, or parent educators) help parents acquire the skills to promote their children’s development.  The home visiting programs help families connect to necessary services, such as health care or community resources, and monitor child development and progress on developmental milestones. MIECHV provides most of its funds to support rigorously evaluated programs for which there’s well-documented evidence of success.  Research shows these programs can lead to reduced health care costs, reduced need for remedial education, and increased family self-sufficiency.

Home Visiting Evidence of Effectiveness Review: Executive Summary

Home Visiting Evidence of Effectiveness website

Effective, Evidence-Based Home Visiting Programs in Every State at Risk if Congress Does Not Extend Funding

Los Angeles Country’s GAIN Sanction Home Visit Outreach (GSHVO) project seeks to reduce sanctions and increase the work participation rate. As the name suggests, it provides home visiting and other forms of outreach to GAIN (welfare to work) participants who are at risk of being sanctioned or who are already sanctioned. The outreach establishes contact and helps participants resolve their barriers to participation. Since GSHVO started in 2005, sanctions in LA County have declined in number and as a share of total GAIN participants.

GAIN Sanction Home Visit Outreach Project Presentation

Building Nebraska’s Families (BNF) was an intensive home visitation and life skills education program to prepare high-risk TANF clients in rural Nebraska to succeed in the world of work and improve their families’ well-being. BNF operated in more than 10 multi-county rural service areas from 2002 to 2005. Masters’ level educators, with very small caseloads of between 12 and 18 clients, carried out the home visits. On average, clients participated in one-hour home-based sessions weekly or bi-weekly during an eight-month period. Research from Mathematica Policy Research’s randomized control trial of the program found large and highly significant impacts on stable employment for hard-to-employ TANF clients who faced substantial employment barriers and skill deficiencies.  The strengths-based curriculum used to teach the life skills is available for purchase at extremely low cost (see below).  While the curriculum was designed to be implemented in individuals’ homes, it could also potentially be adapted for office-based work.

BNF Curriculum – Survive, Strive, Thrive: Keys to Healthy Family Living
The CD (which has all the curriculum materials on it) is $20.  The notebook which has hard copies of all of the curriculum materials is $35.

Mathematica Presentation on the Program and the Findings: The Impacts of a Home Visitation and Life Skills Education Program for Hard-to-Employ TANF Recipients

Mathematica Policy Brief – Teaching Self-Sufficiency through Home Visitation and Life Skills Education

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