ADVOCACY

Healthy Families Illinois (HFI)

• Healthy Families Illinois is a voluntary program of intensive and continuing home visiting which assists parents of newborns through education, hands-on coaching, and access to community services.  It is modeled after and credentialed by Healthy Families America, a national initiative of Prevent Child Abuse America.  Its goals are to promote positive par-enting, to maximize child health and development, and to prevent child abuse and neglect.
  
  Begun in 1997 with state funding, HFI grew to an $11 million statewide program in 51 different communities serving over 3,000 families annually by 2001.  There has been no additional funding since 2001.  New parent home visiting services have not been able to grow toward meeting the statewide need for several thousand families. Our vision is for these services to reach full scale in Illinois through incremental growth each year.

 

In 2008, we will seek a $10 million increase for new parent home visiting services in Illinois.

 

At the federal level, we will advocate for passage of The Education Begins at Home Act (EBAH) to provide $500 million over three years to help states establish or expand quality home visitation programs for new parents.