Virginia’s Plan for Home Visiting

 

Virginia’s Plan for Home Visiting addresses the Commonwealth’s key priorities for pregnant persons and families with young children and sets a bold strategic direction for growing services to achieve collective impact. Informed by the Early Impact Virginia statewide home visiting needs assessment, and with input from more than 200 stakeholders at the local and state levels, this Strategic Plan provides the context and direction necessary to fully operationalize the Plan for Home Visiting, which was adopted in 2019.

The Virginia Plan for Home Visiting was developed in collaboration with members of the Alliance for Early Childhood Home Visiting. Alliance members represent Virginia’s eight statewide home visiting models, as well as other early childhood partners from across the Commonwealth.

Virginia has a long history of collaborative leadership across the home visiting system. Over the past two decades, this system has evolved based on a core set of foundational tenets that reflect the culture, values and structures unique to our Commonwealth.

Virginia’s Plan for Home Visiting Framework

The 2019-2020 budget signed into law granted Early Impact Virginia the authority and responsibility to determine, systematically track and report annually on the key activities and outcomes of Virginia’s home visiting programs; conduct systematic and statewide needs assessments for Virginia’s home visiting programs at least once every three years; and to support continuous quality improvement, training, and coordination across Virginia’s home visiting programs on an ongoing basis.

Virginia’s home visiting system serves as an example of the important role that public-private collaboration can play in building effective, innovative approaches to service delivery. Sustaining and expanding home visiting services to achieve the promise of prevention requires a higher level of coordination across the early childhood system. While evidence based programming is essential to strong outcomes, so too is the need for maintaining model fidelity and efficiency to ensure the absolute best use of public and private investment. This framework was designed to create the structure and expectations needed to support long-term sustainability. Capitalizing on the system that is in place and building a sustainable approach for the future will yield the greatest return on investment and the best possible outcomes for Virginia’s most vulnerable young children.

View The Framework for Virginia’s Plan here.

Early Impact Virginia’s Strategic Plan: The Virginia Plan for Home Visiting

Virginia’s Plan for Home Visiting addresses the Commonwealth’s key priorities for pregnant persons and families with young children and sets a bold strategic direction for growing services to achieve collective impact. Informed by the Early Impact Virginia statewide home visiting needs assessment, and with input from more than 200 stakeholders at the local and state levels, this Strategic Plan provides the context and direction necessary to fully operationalize the Plan for Home Visiting, which was adopted in 2019.

Tenets are reflected throughout the Home Visiting Strategic Plan and include: Leadership, Experience, Infrastructure and Flexibility.

Download the full Virginia Plan for Home Visiting here.

Community Readiness Toolkit

Home visiting is an essential service for supporting healthy children and families across Virginia and the need for home visiting services in Virginia communities is substantial. Multiple needs assessments indicate existing home visiting services are essential for community health and well-being. However, too many communities lack enough home visiting capacity to meet the needs of children and families.

To address this challenge, we need multiple stakeholders working together at the community and state level to sustain, strengthen, and expand home visiting services. Ideally, this work should be informed by a ‘community readiness assessment’ that provides data and insights for strategy development.

This toolkit is designed to help home visiting stakeholders assess community readiness and use the results to inform planning and development of home visiting programs. This introductory section provides additional background on the purpose of community readiness assessment. The rest of the document presents a series of worksheets for guiding your work.

Download EIV’s Community Readiness Toolkit here.