Pritzker Children’s Initiative supports the expansion of prenatal-to-three services at the state and local level with equity and family leadership at the center of their systems.
Family Connects is an evidence-based, universally-offered model for families with newborns. Family participation is voluntary and free to receive an in-home postpartum clinical checkup and referrals to community resources and services, as needed, for both the infant and mother. Family Connects International now oversees the implementation of the model in 20 states.
Help Me Grow (sponsored by Connecticut Children’s Medical Center Foundation Inc.) is the only evidence-based early childhood system model existing nationwide. The Help Me Grow National Affiliate Network is comprised of 30 states and the District of Columbia. Each implements unique, locally-customized systems that offer a central point of contact for families to navigate a real-time directory of resources, from basic needs to child development supports like home visiting, health care, early learning, speech therapy, parent support, and much more.
Home Grown (sponsored by Health Federation of Philadelphia) is a national collaborative of 17 funders committed to improving the quality of and access to home-based child care. While home-based care is the most popular choice of parents, it is also, due to its decentralized nature, the least understood. Home Grown is the epicenter of research, best practices, and tools for policymakers and practitioners.
The Institute hosts an online repository, known as the IMPACT Measures Tool, to inform practitioners, policymakers, and the public about critical measures of child development. The repository also identifies and fills gaps in the field by facilitating the crowdsourcing of the development of new measurements that have proven successful at the community level.
The Stanford Center on Early Childhood is home to the RAPID Survey Project, a program of national and place-based surveys designed to capture essential information on the needs, health-promoting behaviors, and well-being of households with children under six and the early care and education workforce. RAPID amplifies the voices of caregivers and disseminates ongoing, timely data to support investments in and development of data- and caregiver-informed state and local policies.
A team at the University of Nebraska Medical Center has launched Kidsights Data, an initiative to build demand for and generate population-level data that tracks the development of children from birth to five in the United States using the Kidsights Measurement Tool. This tool is the first population-based measurement tool of a core set of child development skills for children birth to age five in the United States.