Promise 1000

Welcome to the second edition of our 2021 Promise 1000 - Home Visiting Collective newsletter. We hope you are enjoying a great summer of warmth and hopefully finding some relaxation as well! Community events and activities did pick up over the last several months. We do hope everyone stays safe and healthy so we can look forward to a fantastic fall. Thank you for your ongoing support and interest in our collective impact initiative.

COVID-19 continues to be at the forefront impacting decisions and innovative service delivery of our contracted home visiting agencies (HVAs). Each HVA is making individual agency decisions on how they can best continue to engage and serve their participants and community. To that effect, there continues to be a variety of type of home visits conducted including still offering all virtual visits, a hybrid of virtual and in-home visits, and in-person visits. HVAs resuming some in-home visits have put into place protective procedures ranging from taking of temperatures of home visitor and family members and wearing PPE and masks in cooperation and with permission from parents who want to resume in-home visits. We expect a hybrid of models to continue for the immediate future.

Promise 1000 continues to check in with agencies monthly to determine how else the collaborative can provide support to HVAs including arranging for training in the immediate future to continue virtually, offerring training modules online, ordering additional masks, handing out thermometers, distributing infant healthcare kits, communicating information about vaccine availability and facts via social media, etc.

As Promise 1000 soon approaches a decade (we can't believe it has almost been 10 years!) of collective impact work within the home visiting field in 2022, we have completed a recent refresh and update to our logo and taglines. Our ongoing Vision...

HEALTHY CHILDREN. HEALTHY FAMILIES. HEALTHY COMMUNITIES

continues to guide our work today. Promise 1000 functions support home visiting agencies, staff, and families served in the community as well as contributing to regional and state-wide work promoting capacity building, fiscal sustainability, and innovative practices. With voting and input from our stakeholders, families, and community partners, we are excited to unveil our new logo designed by the marketing department of our fiscal agent, United Way of Greater Kansas City.

This new logo depicts the focal point of our work and important foundation of love, attachment & bonding, safety & security, health & wellness between a parent and child with the support of the hand under the home representing the collective impact & collaborative work of Promise 1000. Both this direct engagement and collective work go hand in hand to create a better tomorrow for children and our communities.

We have also added a tagline...Earliest Days Matter. As we continue to increase prenatal enrollment within Promise 1000, ensure training and understanding of the importance of prenatal development including brain development and health and wellness of mother and baby, and address health disparities impacting maternal morbidity and infant mortality within marginalized populations, we seek to heighten the importance and understanding that the earliest days do matter!

You will see our website, marketing materials (also available at promise1000.org), presentations, etc. updated with our new profile over the coming months. Thanks to many of you for your helpful input to this process!

July 1 began our 2021-2022 fiscal year and we have now reached our 6th year of providing direct funding to contracted home visiting agencies (HVAs) for shared data collection (plus 2 years of funding to early pilot programs).

Promise 1000's original and primary population served is in the bi-state Kansas City metropolitan region which includes 5 Counties - Wyandotte and Johnson counties in Kansas and Jackson, Platte, and Clay in Missouri.

In addition, some participating home visiting agencies provided services in the following counties: Miami, KS and Johnson, Cass, Andrew, and Buchanan, MO.

Promise 1000 has supported expansion of home visiting services to underserved counties in Missouri. This expansion has allowed children and families in Missouri access to valuable home visiting services in Ray, Carroll, Holt, Atchison, Worth, Gentry, Nodaway, Daviess, Clinton, Dekalb, Caldwell, Lafayette, Saline and Livingston counties.

One of our contracted home visiting agencies, Easterseals Midwest, has continued to expand and increase access to home visiting services in many of these additional counties within the Kansas City Metro area as well as Northwest Missouri region through new and updated contracts as well.

In total, HVAs participating in Promise 1000 now provide services to 24 counties in Kansas and Missouri!

The easiest, equitable, and most efficient way to make referrals in any area or county continues to be through our promise1000.org website which houses our centralized referral intake sytem (CRIS). This ensures that each family is matched to the best-fit home visiting agency in their county that has available openings based on the child's age and zip code of residence. This also helps ensure that referrals are processed timely or that follow up occurs with agencies as needed to assist getting a family to these free and voluntary home visiting services as quickly as possible.

At the end of our previous fiscal year in March, April, and May 2021,

Promise 1000 hosted virtual 'watch-parties' and training presentations for our Promise 1000 network of home visitors as well as other community partners who also conduct in-home work or work with new parents, in addition to many Parents As Teachers Parent Educators from MO DESE.

These topics were:

March: Ages & Stages Questionnnaire (ASQ) & PICCOLO Implementation recorded presentation by Brookes Publishing

April: Maternal Care to 5: Systems Change Supporting Mother/Baby recorded presentation by Dr. Joia Perry (Founder/President National Birth Equity Collaborative, Principal at Health Equity Cypher, Board of Trustees Black Mamas Matter Alliance, National Clinical Training Center for Family Planning, Adjunct Professor Tulane School of Public Health)

May: Restoring Safety through Compassionate Connections interactive webinar led by Michelle Graff (Cultivating Human Resiliency)

Now in our new fiscal year we are launching 19 online training modules for Promise 1000 home visitors, in the areas of:

• Maternal Health & Well-being (Pregnancy, Postpartum care, Reproductive Health, Breastfeeding)
• Child Health & Well-being (Well-Child Care Checks, Infant Health)
  
• Child Development & School Readiness (Brain Dev. & Behavior, ASQ-3 & ASQ-SE, Parent Child Interactions PICCOLO)
  
• Home Safety & Family Resiliency (Home Environment, Safe Infant Sleep, Potty Training & Discipline, Intimate Partner Violence, Substance Use)
  
• General Promise 1000 Trainings (REDCap database, Engaging Families, Equity)
  

These online modules will be easily accessible to home visitors within the Promise 1000 network as new staff are hired or to provide professional development ongoing education to veteran staff.

Did you know there are 3500 infant sleep related deaths

per year in the United States?

The most frequently reported causes of these infant sleep deaths are:

SIDS: The leading cause of infant death from 1-12 months of age

Cause is unknown or undertermined: a thorough investigation was not conducted or cause could not be determined or remains unknown.

Sleep related suffocation: the leading cause of infant injury death

Additionally, Black and American Indian or Alaskan Native Infants are about 2 times more likely to die of SIDS and other sleep related Sudden Infant Death (SUID) than white infants.

The Missouri CFRP 2019 Annual Report includes statistics on sleep-related infant deaths in Missouri over a 3 year period (2017-2019). Findings included:

• 51% of all sleep related infant deaths were known to have occurred while the infant was sleeping in an adult bed.

• 45 of these deaths the infant was sharing a sleep surface with an adult or other child.
• 6 of these deaths the child became tangled in or face down into pillows or thick comforters.

https://dss.mo.gov/re/pdf/cfrar/2019-eliminating-child-abuse-and-neglect.pdf

https://dss.mo.gov/re/pdf/cfrar/2021-eliminating-child-abuse-and-neglect.pdf

While SIDS rates are decreasing, rates of other sleep related deaths are increasing such as suffocation, which is the primary cause over time for unsafe sleep deaths. It is important to acknowledge that parents want to do what is best for their child, understand how infants ended up in an unsafe sleep environment, and investigate common misconceptions about infant safe sleep.

With awarded grant funding from the Missouri Children's Trust Fund (CTF), Children's Mercy-Kansas City's Division of Child Adversity & Resilience, along with other internal divisions, will create and manage an infant safe sleep initiative:

Safe Sleep - Safe Babies Community Network

This network includes partnership with over 20 Missouri community partners in effort to prevent sleep related infant deaths and expand education and understanding about infant safe sleep while increasing access for parents to have safe sleep environments for their infant and materials throughout Jackson County.

Community partners have dedicated staff trained by Children's Mercy personnel in Infant Safe Sleep and agree to provide this safe sleep education, videos, and pre-survey to their programs' participants with infants under 1 year of age (with no income restrictions). These parent participants will receive a portable pack-n-play and safe sleep kit (containing Halo sack, pacifier, book, and safe sleep materials) from Cribs For Kids. It is anticipated that approximately 500 cribs and safe sleep education will be disseminated each year through this community initiative.

Training on this community initiative project began in July for our community partners to begin providing this resource to their current clients with future public marketing campaigns scheduled for fall and winter including social media campaigns, public transit bus marketing, PSAs, and community education. If your agency is serving expectant parents or new parents and is interested in participating in the Safe Sleep-Safe Babies Community Network please reach out to Sommer Rose for more information at sdrose@cmh.edu.

Current Missouri Community Partners for this project include:

Amethyst Place

CAPA (Child Abuse Prevention Association)

Center for Childhood Safety, - Children's Mercy

Department of Environmental Health - Children's Mercy

Easterseals Midwest

Front Porch Alliance (FPA)

Healing House

Healthy Blue Missouri

Healthy Families America Home Visiting - Children's Mercy

Juneteenth KC

Kansas City MO Police Department

MO Children's Division

Mother's Refuge

Nurture KC

Samuel U. Rodgers Health Center

Sheffield Place

St. Joseph Youth Alliance

St. Lukes Hospital of Kansas City

Swope Health - Children's Services (Pediatrics)

Synergy Services

TIES (Team for Infants Exposed to Substance Use) - Children's Mercy

Truman Medical Center - Lakewood Family Birthplace

As we showcased in our last newsletter, we continue to provide technical assistance and support to advance capacity building and coordinated home visiting systems. Most recently this includes ongoing work with:

• Partnering with 3 budding collective impact hubs to provide them with technical assistance, support and building of data collection systems that align metrics across the State. These hubs are supported by the Missouri Children's Trust Fund (CTF) and include in Brighter Beginnings (Columbia/Boone County area), Greene County Home Visiting Network (Greene County and surrounding areas), and Generate Health (St. Louis area).
• Following the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) Preschool Development Grant (PDG) which is assessing the need for a more integrated, coordinated, and data-informed approach to ensure that Missouri's children have equitable access to high-quality, comprehensive services, Promise 1000 staff provided data consultation to the NGA Prenatal to Three group supporting and informing this work.
• Partnering with the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Servivces (DHSS) & Missouri CTF to maintain a REDCap electronic home visiting database that replicates the Promise 1000 home visiting database formatting and structure and provides staff with a user-friendly database that was built for home visiting, aligns data metrics, and is easily adaptable to their needs.
• Following and providing input on the establishment of the new Missouri Office of Childhood which will consolidate early childhood programs and home visiting in one single Office of Childhood. Currently, each state agency provides various services for children and families. https://earlyconnections.mo.gov/who-we-are/new-office-childhood

There are 17 local home visiting agencies that receive home visiting referrals through CRIS (Centralized Referral Intake System) within our website at www.promise1000.org with the goal of expanding home visiting to even more families in need of services. Since CRIS began through 2021, we have had 1,030 referrals (from 154 Caregivers and 876 Professionals) and 178 unique referral sources.

Promise 1000 began its sixth year of fully scaled programming and shared data colleciton in July 2021. The most recent fiscal year resulted in serving 609 children compared to the first-year cohort serving 449 children. Cumulatively, over the most recent 5-year period, home visiting agencies participating in Promise 1000 have served over 1,300 unduplicated children and provided 26,674 home visits tailored to the needs of the family.

Email: promise1000@cmh.edu
Website: promise1000.org
Phone: 816-234-3732
Facebook: Promise1000HomeVisiting
Twitter: @Promise_1000