Home Visiting and Child Welfare

The I-PPYC-HV project provides pregnant and parenting youth in child welfare care with access to voluntary home visiting services that are provided by eight programs in Cook County, the collar counties, and central Illinois.

The project goals are to do the following:

• Promote nurturing parent-child relationships and healthy child development
• Enhance family functioning by reducing the risk of abuse and building protective factors
• Break the intergenerational cycle of abuse, neglect and trauma
• Increase coordination between the child welfare and home visiting systems
• Create a model that can be replicated throughout Illinois

I-PPYC-HV uses the Healthy Families America curriculum and includes infant/early childhood mental health consultation.

An evaluation was conducted by Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago; it included both an implementation and an outcome study.

Expansion is underway to include other evidence-based home visiting models and additional communities.

Click here to view the pilot project evaluation final report.

A new training called; Serving Families with Child Welfare Involvement is now available through the PLN Portal.  This training is offered in a recorded webinar format narrated by Jaime Russell, Home Visiting Program Director at Children’s Home and Aid in Bloomington, Illinois.  The training is designed to Increase knowledge, provide guidance, and build competency for home visiting and doula programs in effectively collaborating with the child welfare system on behalf of children and families in Illinois.  Participants will have access to a toolkit that offers background information, program guidance, and sample templates and forms.  The program guidance reflects the experience of the Illinois Pregnant and Parenting Youth in Care Home Visiting project (I-PPYC-HV) coordinated by Children’s Home & Aid, and the Home Visiting-Child Welfare Partnership led by the Erikson DCFS Early Childhood Project and vetted by home visiting and doula program models.

Funded by the Illinois Department of Human Services-Division of Early Childhood Home Visiting (IDHS-DEC HV) program, a toolkit and webinar are now available from Children’s Home & Aid to support home visiting and doula programs serving families with child welfare involvement. The toolkit and webinar are designed for universal use across home visiting models and funders.

The toolkit and webinar provide guidance on best practice procedures when working to coordinate, collaborate, and communicate between two systems that have historically functioned separately from one another. The toolkit intentionally limits prescriptive guidance because all programs, communities, and collaborations function differently, and the guidance should be flexible to meet local needs.

For questions about the training content, please reach out to Lauren Wiley at lwiley@startearly.org.

To learn more or participate in this project contact Jaime Russell at Jrussell@childrenshomeandaid.org