With the goal of nurturing “happy, healthy and successful” kids in Indian Country and preventing entries into foster care, the federal government has awarded six tribal communities a total of $3 million to expand programs that serve families with young children in their homes — the most recent award in an ongoing expansion of such programs.
The U.S. Administration for Children and Families funds fall under a larger investment of more than $30 million for the Tribal Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting program, which focuses on expectant parents and their children from birth through kindergarten. Federal dollars awarded today will go toward establishing home-visiting programs in communities that don’t currently have such services. The Seneca Nation of Indians in New York; Oglala Sioux Tribe in South Dakota; Future Generations Collaborative in Oregon; Jicarilla Apache Nation in New Mexico; Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation in Connecticut and the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium will divide the funds.
“We are very excited about this new round of grant recipients, who will develop their programs in collaboration with their communities reflecting their cultures and representing the vision, priorities and hopes they have for future generations,” said Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Jeff Hild in a press statement. Hild said as tribal home-visiting programs continue to expand, his agency looks forward to working with the new grant recipients “and honoring tribal sovereignty as they continue in their journey to provide essential services for young American Indian and Alaska Native children and their families.”
While many federally funded child welfare programs require a scientific evidence base, home-visiting services on tribal lands can receive funding for interventions that are “either evidence-based or considered a promising approach,” according to the Administration for Children and Families’ Office of Early Childhood Development. One such program, Family Spirit, has met the federal criteria for showing evidence of effectiveness through a systematic review.
The program created in 1995 focuses on intergenerational behavioral health, serving Native American mothers from pregnancy through their children’s third birthdays. It operates through a partnership between the Johns Hopkins Center for Indigenous Health and the Navajo, White Mountain Apache and San Carlos Apache tribal communities. The team began conducting randomized controlled trials in 2001 and have since shown positive outcomes with parent and child participants.
Mothers in the Family Spirit program — which provides parents 24 and younger with one-on-one parent training in their own homes through a 63-lesson curriculum — experienced lower levels of stress, reduced depression and a decline in substance abuse. Children were less likely to be emotionally “dysregulated,” participants reported, and they faced a lower risk of addiction and future behavioral health problems.
Such tribal home-visiting models that are selected for federal funding must be “collaborative and community-driven,” and match local needs and the ability of tribes to implement the program. Other examples include Parents as Teachers, Nurse-Family Partnership and the Parent-Child Assistance Program. A randomized trial in 2021 found that five years after using the model of a “universal newborn nurse home-visiting program,” children were 33% less likely to have emergency medical care, and 39% less likely to be subjected to a child protective services investigation.
Their aims are to support “happy, healthy, and successful American Indian and Alaska Native children and families,” according to the Administration for Children and Families.
The approach centers on home visits from service providers who can further maternal and child health and development, provide early learning resources and better support families to prevent abuse and neglect. Programs that receive federal funds must be “high-quality, culturally grounded,” expand connections with other child-serving systems, and be able to expand the evidence base for home-based services. Pregnant women, expectant fathers, and parents and caregivers of children under age 5 are among those eligible for services.
While they receive the help, federal grantees must measure and report on progress toward meeting “legislatively mandated benchmarks” for the families involved.
Under the Biden administration, funds for tribes to implement programs such as these have expanded, a press release for the Administration for Children and Families stated, and constitute a continued growth in investment. This fiscal year, the administration awarded $30.8 million in the Tribal Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program that has so far served 82 tribal communities and 18 urban Indian communities nationwide.
