Spotlight: Promise 1000 Home Visiting for Kansas City
Promise 1000 is aimed toward demonstrating the collective impact of a collaborative of home visiting agencies serving families with young children in the bi-state metropolitan region. The collaborative was formed just over six years ago by three founding partners: Children’s Mercy Hospital, United Way of Greater Kansas City and Health Forward Foundation. There are currently 10 funded home visiting agencies fully engaged in Promise 1000 activities, and each agency employs an evidence based model or promising approach: Healthy Families America, Parents As Teachers, Early Head Start, Team for Infants Exposed to Substance Abuse, Nurturing Parenting Program. Additional home visiting agencies in the region are members of the collaborative and engage in various aspects of the program such as centralized referrals, database utilization and participation in Promise 1000 quarterly meetings. Home visiting agencies have an opportunity to apply to become fully engaged and funded through Promise 1000 on an annual basis. Centralized operations focused on standardized data collection, quality improvement, centralized referrals and demonstration of outcomes are housed at Children’s Mercy.
Promise 1000 targets the first 1000 days of life, be that prenatal to age 3 years or postnatal to age 3 years. The Vision and Mission of Promise 1000 are:
Vision:
• Healthy Children, Healthy Families, Healthy Communities
Mission:
• To provide an innovative, sustainable, collaborative system of evidence-based home visiting services for pregnant women, young children, and their families to achieve optimal physical, mental, social, emotional health and educational outcomes
Promise 1000 home visiting serves families facing challenges such as poverty, inadequate prenatal care, young mothers, single mothers, substance abuse, or child maltreatment and other adverse childhood experiences. Currently the funded agencies collectively provide home visiting services to about 700 children between the ages of 0 to 3 years, living within 9 counties in Kansas or Missouri. Our Centralized Referral and Intake System (CRIS) can be found in the center of our webpage www.promise1000.org and consists of eligibility questions that anyone can complete to connect a family to Promise 1000 home visiting. As well, there is additional information about the program on the webpage and many resources offered.
We use data driven processes in a population-based health approach to have a collective impact on the social determinants of health. Promise 1000 has four areas of focus to improve the lives and outcomes for the young children and families served: 1) child health and well-being, 2) maternal health and well-being, 3) child development and school readiness, and 4) home safety and family resilience. By using the common database as a tool and shared process measures, Promise 1000 employs quality improvement activities to achieve targeted outcomes. Not only are we tuned into how the collaborative is doing, but each individual home visiting agency can assess their agency’s accomplishments achieved through the challenging work of their home visitors providing support and encouragement to families enrolled in Promise 1000.
We have established contracts and collaborative partnerships with organizations that provide supportive services to address targeted needs and achieve great outcomes. For example, Promise 1000 offers Moving Beyond DepressionTM, an in-home cognitive behavioral therapy program, for depressed mothers. We offer ACT Raising Safe Kids, a positive parenting program developed by the American Psychological Association, to Promise 1000 families. Most recently, we partnered with The Local Investment Commission (LINC)SM on the First Birthday Project – Safe Sleep Initiative to decrease infant mortality related to unsafe sleep surfaces/practices. Promise 1000 firmly believes there is much benefit to be gained by the partnership of pediatric medical homes and home visiting, given the shared goal of health and well-being for children. Thus, we encourage families to attend well child care visits and support home visitors to be part of the visits.
If you would like further information about Promise 1000, please visit www.Promise1000.org or contact Promise1000@cmh.edu.