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Home Visiting

Overview

Program Resources

Grants and Funding

Home Visiting Programs in Indiana

Home visiting programs throughout Indiana aim to support child and family development through the approach of building positive parent-child relationships, child health and well-being, parent health and well-being, school readiness, and self-sufficiency of family economics.

In Indiana, home visiting programs serve families in all 92 counties, aiming to support child and family development through building positive parent-child relationships, focusing on the health and well-being of parents and their children, and providing community resources to encourage school readiness and family/self-sufficiency.

Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP) is a national, evidence-based, community health program with over 40 years of evidence showing significant improvements in the health and lives of first-time moms and their children. NFP empowers families to transform their lives and futures by having trained nurses regularly visit moms-to-be starting early in pregnancy and continuing through their first child’s second birthday. The nurses are trained to provide support to the first-time mom and baby specific to their current phase, from pregnancy, infancy, and toddlerhood. The primary goals of the program are to improve pregnancy outcomes, child health and development, and families’ economic self-sufficiency.

NFP Mission: Nurse-Family Partnership positively transforms the lives of vulnerable babies, mothers, and families.

NFP Vision: A future where all children are healthy, families thrive, communities prosper, and the cycle of poverty is broken.

NFP is able to provide services to first time moms in all of Indiana’s 92 counties.

Administered by the Indiana Department of Child Services, Healthy Families Indiana is a voluntary home visitation program designed to promote healthy families and healthy children through a variety of services, including child development, access to health care and parent education.

The goals of Healthy Families Indiana are to:

  • Systematically engage families with multiple stressors in home visiting services prenatally or at birth and sustaining community partnerships
  • Promote safe environments for children and families
  • Cultivate and strengthen nurturing parent-child relationships
  • Promote healthy childhood growth and development through parent engagement
  • Enhance family functioning by reducing risk and building protective factors for optimal childhood outcomes
  • Provide staff with the training and support needed for their professional well being

Healthy Families Indiana services are available in all 92 counties, through 29 agencies.

Find your local program at https://www.in.gov/dcs/prevention/healthy-families-indiana/.

Early Head Start programs serve children birth to three, pregnant women, and their families while Head Start serves children ages three to kindergarten entry who have incomes below the federal poverty level. Similar to Head Start programs, Early Head Start programs promote cognitive, social and emotional development of young children by emphasizing the role of parents as their child's first and most important teacher. These programs help build relationships with families that support family well-being and many other important areas. Early Head Start programs can be home-based or center-based or a combination of both.

Early Head Start home-based programs are considered home visiting programs by federal and state standards. Families are paired with a family support provider who visits families one-on-one in their home or in the community. They can help families get connected to resources for food, clothing, items for the baby, job training, healthcare and more.

Find your local program at https://www.in.gov/fssa/carefinder/head-start-and-early-head-start/.

There are other various programs throughout Indiana that fall outside of the national home visiting models. These programs follow evidence based or informed models to provide a replication or locally home-grown home visiting program. Programs that fall under this category can sometimes provide more flexibility to fit needs within their community, such as enrollment requirements, length of program, and provided services.

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My Healthy Baby

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Program Resources

Grants and Funding Resources

Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) provides an unprecedented opportunity for collaboration and partnership at the Federal, State, and community levels to improve health and development outcomes for at-risk children through evidence-based home visiting programs.

Visit the MIECHV page

Since 2018, the Indiana Department of Health has supported implementation of Nurse-Family Partnership (NFP) using state funding. In 2022, additional funds were allocated for statewide expansion of NFP programming.

Visit the NFP page

From 2005 until 2015, Indiana had one of the worst infant mortality rates in the Midwest and the entire country. To combat the trend and help stop preventable infant deaths, Indiana passed the Safety PIN – Protecting Indiana’s Newborns Grant program, IC Section 16-46-14. This legislation allowed non-reverting, state-appropriated funds to be granted to organizations in the efforts to reduce infant mortality.

Since the first implementation of the Safety PIN grant, portions of this funding has been used to start and expand locally home grown and evidence-based home visiting programs. Funded programs aim to complement the work of other home visiting funding to broaden the services to families in Indiana without duplicating services.

Visit the Safety PIN page

Since the My Healthy Baby (MHB) Initiative went live in January 2020, MHB has offered four one-time grants to help support home visiting infrastructure and stabilize the workforce. Currently, there are two active grants:

MHB Stabilizing the Perinatal Home Visiting Workforce My Healthy Baby has awarded over $3 million to 42 home visiting programs, with the purpose of stabilizing the perinatal home visiting capacity by focusing on staff recruitment and retention.

MHB Infrastructure 3.0 - My Healthy Baby has awarded over $600 thousand to 20 home visiting programs with the purpose of supporting a one-time- infrastructure costs incurred to assure delivery of coordinated and comprehensive voluntary perinatal home visiting services to families.

Visit the My Healthy Baby page