Great things happen when community organizations join forces to amplify their impact.
Last year, staff with IndyEast Promise Neighborhood, a community initiative working to prepare students in the near eastside and Martindale Brightwood neighborhoods for college and career success, met with the HealthNet team to discuss needs and opportunities for support. Home visits in early childhood emerged as a clear need; HealthNet had deep experience with the Healthy Families early childhood model but lacked the capacity to serve all referrals in the IndyEast Promise service area.
In a stroke of good timing, the organizations, in collaboration with John Boner Neighborhood Centers and Edna Martin Christian Center, were able to add a Healthy Families team to serve the IndyEast Promise area through Early Years Initiative. With nine locations in central Indiana as well as a Bloomington location, HealthNet serves families from diverse backgrounds and offers services in Spanish, Burmese, Haitian Creole, Hakha Chin and other languages, making them the ideal partner to expand services to the IndyEast Promise neighborhoods.
The Healthy Families model includes developmental screenings, connections to community resources, parenting education and more. The program serves families with children from birth to age three, and families must enroll before the baby is three months old. If a family doesn’t qualify for Healthy Families, the team can refer them to the Parents as Teachers program through Edna Martin Christion Center, which has broader guidelines for enrollment. When families graduate from Healthy Families after the child turns three, if they are still in need of consistent support the team is able to refer them to the Parents as Teachers program as well.
In addition to the Healthy Families team, the Early Years Initiative allowed for the hiring of an engagement specialist to increase community outreach. “Adding our engagement specialist has been really helpful,” said Brianne Biancardi, Healthy Families program manager. “She attends tons of community events, she attends job fairs, she’s really making those connections within the community and making sure families know about our services and how we can support them.”
Early literacy also has been a key focus area of their Early Years Initiative work. “We’ve always encouraged literacy, of course, but through Early Years Initiative we’re able to be more intentional about focusing on early literacy with each family,” said Kendra Scott, Healthy Families supervisor. “One of the things we do with our families is set goals, and since we’ve started to focus more on literacy, we’ve had multiple families set literacy-related goals. One mom of four said ‘I want to make time to read to my daughters every night for 30 minutes, because it will help my daughters at school’. Another parent set a goal to read to her three children before bed 3-4 nights each week, something the family does not currently do.”
Regular book donations to each family also help them build a home library with bilingual, age-appropriate materials. Even though the Healthy Families model is focused on children ages birth – three years old, other family members in the home benefit. Scott shared a story of one family with a baby, a preschooler and an elementary-school aged child. The oldest child was struggling with reading and literacy skills and was falling behind in school. Through visits and conversations with the Healthy Families home visitor, the mom realized she needed to take a more active role and work with the child at home; she now sets aside 15 minutes each day to read one-on-one with each child to focus on improving critical literacy skills.
Capacity is always an issue, and Biancardi would love to continue to add staff members to accommodate every family who is referred for services. For now, the team remains committed to reaching as many families as possible, ensuring that every child in the program has the support they need to thrive. As the program materials say, “Every family has a story and every story matters to Healthy Families.”
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