Photo of the CCOHVS team: Rebecca Brown, Kristin Miyamoto, Callie Lambarth, Beth Green, and Ron Joseph
One of the key ways that the state of Oregon supports early childhood health, development, and family support is through its numerous federal, state, and local investments in early childhood home visiting services. Home visiting programs provide high-quality, comprehensive support to families with young children, starting during pregnancy, through age two and beyond.
Unfortunately, the many state agencies and other organizations that provide home visiting services have struggled to work together as a coordinated and aligned system. This resulted in a fragmented, uncoordinated set of programs that are complicated for parents to access and confusing for health care providers and other partners to understand. This creates barriers for families that perpetuate inequities in access and quality across the state.
The Center for Coordinating Oregon Home Visiting Systems (CCOHVS - “COVES”) seeks to remedy these barriers. Launched in February 2024 at the Center for Improvement of Child and Family Services (CCF) at Portland State University, CCOHVS will function as a program-neutral backbone for supporting state and regional coordination of prenatal and early childhood home visiting services in Oregon. It is being funded by a public-private partnership with investments from the Oregon Health Authority, The Ford Family Foundation, and the Oregon Department of Early Learning and Care. CCOHVS will receive $535,000 per year for the first two years.
“For at least twenty years, there's been a need and desire to coordinate these programs to make the system more accessible,” says Beth Green, PhD, Director of Early Childhood and Family Support Research at PSU, “The goal is to make sure that every family, with its unique needs and strengths, can have equitable access to the supports that are right for them, at the right time. We believe that all pregnant people and new parents should be offered support - and ensuring that's possible is one of our goals.”
Launching the CCOHVS was a priority for the Oregon Early Learning Council, which has identified home visiting system coordination as a key part of Raise Up Oregon, the state’s comprehensive strategic plan for early childhood (prenatal to age five). The Early Learning Council — a body of eleven members appointed by the governor — partners with six state agencies on this plan: the Oregon Department of Education, the Oregon Department of Early Learning and Care, the Oregon Department of Human Services, the Oregon Health Authority, Oregon Housing and Community Services, and the Higher Education Coordinating Commission. Together they coordinate a unified system of early learning throughout Oregon to ensure that all children — no matter their background or community — enter school ready to learn, with healthy, stable, and attached families.
The CCOHVS work will provide increased capacity to support regional and state early childhood leaders to move closer to Raise Up Oregon’s vision for early learning services, so they are equitable, integrated, accessible, inclusive, anti-racist, and family centered. CCOHVS will use an inclusive, relationship-focused approach to increase awareness of the benefits of early childhood home visiting; support regional implementation of coordinated intake and referral systems for home visiting programs; and work with state and regional leaders to make changes in home visiting program funding, policy and practice needed to advance this system vision.
CCOHVS has nine goals for this approach:
- To ensure family leadership in transforming home visiting services at the state and local levels.
- To expand decision-making partners for home visiting services to include tribal, culturally-specific, and other programs that are outside the primarily state-funded model.
- To promote equitable access to home visiting services by mapping current services and their capacity, and then facilitating strategies that promote funding and access for culturally responsive and sustainable home visiting.
- To support state and regional systems by expanding existing state-level mechanisms, while supporting an interconnection between regional systems.
- To improve the efficiency and effectiveness of support for the home visiting workforce by creating a roadmap for coordinated professional development that supports home visitor retention, well-being, and equitable pay.
- To increase family awareness of, and choice in, home visiting services through a coordinated community awareness communications plan.
- To facilitate more effective and aligned home visiting service data by identifying and building on state and regional efforts to streamline and share information.
- To create more aligned and equitable policies and practices for home visiting services by expanding and working with state-level governance and multiple state agencies on aligned, local, decision-making and implementation.
- To facilitate a cross-sector plan for sustained and expanded funding that will ensure statewide availability of high quality, culturally, and linguistically appropriate home visiting services that will meet the needs of Oregon’s families.
“The long term goal is system transformation for home visiting – and there's a long way to go to get there,” says Beth Green, PhD, Director of Early Childhood and Family Support Research at PSU, “By launching CCOHVS, the state has clearly signaled that there is readiness to do this work. Our goal at the CCOHVS is to facilitate these partnerships and keep the momentum going.”