Home Visiting & Parenting Education System-Building
A bold vision has been adopted for NC’s Home Visiting and Parenting Education System:
All families have access to a range of parenting education supports, from the prenatal period to age 8, within a coordinated delivery system, which will positively impact parent-child relationship and family and child well-being.
Value of a Statewide System
Parents play the lead role in their child’s healthy development and growth. But, parents are increasingly stretched and stressed, and most could use support and assistance during their children’s earliest years, exactly the time when brain development is most rapid and foundational for lifelong health and wellness. Unfortunately, the ability to access parenting support services varies greatly depending on where you live in the state. A patchwork of home visiting services exists across North Carolina and some areas have limited or no services. Services that do exist are funded by a hodgepodge of federal, state, and philanthropy. Most of the existing programs operate in funding and service silos and are not integrated into a larger early childhood system. This lack of coordination makes it difficult, if not impossible, to ensure that home visiting resources are equitably and sufficiently available throughout the state, and that parents are aware of available services. State and community leaders in North Carolina aim to change this situation and have crafted a HVPE System Action Plan to achieve a shared vision.
The HVPE System Action Plan calls for better coordination across state funders and across programs to build and maintain a system that remediates racial and economic inequities through the equitable access points, quality, and distribution of services by:
- collecting and using data across funders and program models to assure services are targeted where there is need and to measure and track outcomes;
- assuring dedicated resources are spent in the most effective way;
- improving the quality of services through professional development and continual improvement based on family feedback and impact measures;
- reducing administrative burden of community service providers who may currently need to report separately to different funders as they combine funding to serve families; and
- supporting community level system-building to coordinate all home visiting and parenting education services as well as connect them with other early childhood services such as child care, preschool, health, and mental health to improve family access to services.
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Action Plan Summary (MS Word)
View The Complete Home Visiting and Parenting Education System Action Plan (PDF) updated 2/28