About Oregon's Home Visiting

What is Early Childhood Home Visiting?

Early Childhood Home Visiting (ECHV) is an effective service delivery strategy for supporting the healthy development and well-being of children and families (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families). Endorsed as an effective strategy by the American Academy of Pediatrics, ECHV involves three main activities provided by an array of professionals to families in their home environments, typically including: (1) assessing family needs, (2) parenting education and supports for parental well-being, and (3) referring and connecting families to needed services in the community. Decades of research has shown that these services improve a wide range of outcomes including maternal health, child health and development, child maltreatment prevention, and family economic self-sufficiency.

While home visiting can be used as a method for providing a wide variety of different types of interventions and supports, the work of the CCOHVS is focused on strengthening alignment and coordination for programs that use home visiting as a primary service delivery strategy and which initiate and serve families prenatally and/or in the first five years of a child’s life (although a few offer services for longer periods of time). At the same time, we acknowledge that ECHV programs and services exist in a broader system of early childhood and family family support programs, and that there many areas of very real (and appropriate) overlap between early childhood and additional family support programs and systems that form a full range of supportive services for families with young children.

By providing different programs with varying levels of intensity, cost, timing, and duration, the ECHV system can better meet the diverse needs of Oregon’s families and increase the reach and effectiveness of programs. Currently however, fewer than 5% of all families with children less than age five are able to be served through early childhood home visiting. The work of the CCOHVS is to break down barriers so that all families can have have access to a universally-offered, tiered system of ECHV services.

Early Learning Council Focus on Home Visiting
Hear about key findings from the recent Home Visiting System Landscape Report and what some of Oregon’s regions are doing to ensure coordination efforts in their local home visiting systems. Click here to watch the recording

Legislative Home Visiting Informational Hearing

Hear the stories of how home visiting has impacted communities from families and home visitors at the Legislative Informational Hearing for the Senate Sub-Committee on Early Childhood and Behavioral Health. Click here to watch the recording