The Challenge
In the United States, between 12%-16% of children experience developmental, behavioral, and/or emotional delays. If undetected and untreated, these delays could have a profound impact on the lives of children and their families, and on society as a whole. Recognizing this issue, the Inland Empire region in California formed a strategic alliance to adopt the Help Me Grow systems model to address developmental delays in children.
How can a partnership-based approach to the identification and treatment of developmental delays improve outcomes for children and families?
The Approach
The Help Me Grow partners in the Inland Empire region hired VIVA to identify and engage system advocates, map the area's assets, and set the partnership's North Star. This included strategic planning, partnership development, family engagement landscape analysis, evaluation and impact reporting, and extensive communications and outreach support.
- The Early Years: Strategic Planning & Partnership Development
- Getting the Word Out: Communications & Building an Online Community
- Families Count: Turning to Families for Critical Answers
The Early Years: Strategic Planning & Partnership Development
In California, leaders from San Bernardino County and Riverside County (known collectively as the Inland Empire) recognized that early childhood systems must work collaboratively to maximize their resources and leverage opportunities to proactively address developmental delays in their counties.
The Inland Empire’s regional partners, First 5 San Bernardino, First 5 Riverside County, and Loma Linda Children’s Hospital, invited VIVA to help them form a strategic alliance under the nationally-recognized Help Me Grow systems model. This partnership is focused on ensuring communities identify vulnerable children, link families to community-based services, and empower families to support their children’s healthy development.
Through an intensive strategic planning process, VIVA assisted Help Me Grow Inland Empire to identify and engage system advocates, map the area’s assets, and set the partnership’s North Star. Community engagement was woven throughout the process. VIVA planned and facilitated three large stakeholder events to inform the strategic planning process and build support for the initiative.
VIVA’s ongoing partnership development and facilitation continued to guide the effort throughout its first four years, with a dual focus: continued facilitation of a strong and effective core partnership, and strengthening community capacity to support an effective early intervention system.
Getting the Word Out: Communications & Building an Online Community
For HMGIE, a service provider to one of California’s largest, most diverse regions, developing a strong digital communication approach was crucial to establishing their authority in the early development and intervention space, and creating awareness about the critical resources they offer.
Beginning from square one, VIVA helped establish a clean, identifiable, professional but fun brand for HMGIE. Building off of the national brand of Help Me Grows, while putting a modern, approachable spin on the logo and colors that welcomes early childhood professionals and families alike to utilize the resources HMGIE offers.
The unique nature of Help Me Grow’s services is in the comprehensive support they offer as the bridge between parents and early development and intervention providers. To create a website that was an equally relevant to both audiences was a challenge, because what each needs from Help Me Grow is so different.
VIVA installed a two portal system, allowing web visitors to choose their own path to resources, stories, and information. See it at helpmegrowie.org.
To foster a strong online presence, VIVA developed a social media and email marketing strategy, designed to reach families and partners across the region with critical information on HMGIE’s services and the importance of child development. Through sustained investment and consistency, Help Me Grow Inland Empire has grown their online audience and engagement. In the last three years, steady growth has been sustained reciprocally between the online audience and the updated website.
Additional communications and marketing support included developing printed materials for families and partners, and producing annual reports that communicated the growing impact of the initiative.
Families Count: Turning to Families for Critical Answers
In 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, HMGIE had to reimagine how they center families in their services and meaningfully engage them at all levels of the system. For this essential exploration, HMGIE continued their partnership with VIVA to better understand effective, widely-used approaches for family engagement, build out the infrastructure for family partnerships, and implement their strategies over time.
Understanding and identifying the suitable approach for HMGIE to engage families was the first step in advancing these goals. With this in mind, VIVA conducted a landscape analysis to gain insights about the different approaches, strategies, and best practices for engaging families – recognizing the collective expertise of HMG county staff across the state of California.
VIVA co-created a family engagement strategy and implementation plan that allowed HMGIE to integrate family voices and perspectives into the strategic planning process, while adopting a sustainable, phased approach. Each phase tied back to one of the original objectives put forth for the project and was accompanied by detailed, actionable steps for the client to take to advance their work.
The Impact
Since its launch, VIVA’s work with the partnership led to:
- Increased awareness: More families being aware of the resources available to them, leading to earlier identification and treatment of developmental delays in children.
- Expanded access to services: Families who previously had limited access to services due to geographic or financial barriers now have greater access to support for their children's healthy development.
- Improved collaboration: The early childhood systems in the region worked collaboratively, leading to a more efficient use of resources and a more effective cross-systems approach to addressing developmental delays in children.