Illinois Pregnant and Parenting Youth in Care Home Visiting (I-PPYC-HV) Pilot
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.
Serving Families with Child Welfare Involvement: Guidance for Illinois Home Visiting and Doula Programs
Funded by the Illinois Department of Human Services-Division of Early Childhood Home Visiting (IDHS-DEC HV) program, a toolkit is now available from Children’s Home & Aid to support home visiting and doula programs serving families with child welfare involvement. This toolkit is designed for universal use across home visiting models and funders.
This toolkit provides 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.
Click here for the toolkit.