Project Launch

New York

Funded Years : 2009

Project Director :
Susan Perkins
518-474-9023
susan.perkins@ccf.state.ny.us

Address :
52 Washington Street Suite 99
Rensselaer,NY 12144

Project Status : Active

Project Summary : New York Project LAUNCH will engage Westchester County's Community Network, a unique countywide wrap-around service system for children and families, to collaboratively strengthen and enhance early childhood systems in three Westchester County locations: a large city (Yonkers), a small city (Port Chester), and a village (Ossining). This collaboration will demonstrate how municipalities of different sizes and with different infrastructures and resources can support a holistic approach to childhood wellness.

A public health approach will be used to engage the health, mental health, education, child care, and Head Start communities via intensive promotion, prevention, and social marketing activities. The aim is to integrate programs that together provide a complete range of developmentally supportive services to families with young children. Health care, home visiting, parenting education, and early care and education programs will be expanded to locations where they are missing, strengthened where they exist, and integrated across disciplines to achieve the vision articulated in two state plans—the Early Childhood Plan and the Children's Plan—that have each received strong endorsement from New York State's child- and family-serving agencies.

Westchester County's population is reflective of the state's and is, in many ways, a microcosm of the nation as a whole: concentrated wealth surrounded by extreme socio-economic variance, especially on the lower range of that scale. The three target areas comprise significant immigrant and minority populations. The families in the service area represent a cross-section of cultural and linguistic communities, with a large Latino population, many of whom are new immigrants from South America. In all the communities, families are often medically underserved. Parents often hold two or three jobs—generally, work that is low-pay, low-skilled, and erratic—and struggle with acculturation issues, especially when English is their second language.

Project LAUNCH builds on existing innovative approaches in Westchester County, as well as those being proposed for future implementation in an expanded system of care for young children. These compliment the considerable body of work done at the state level to provide the fundamentals of a statewide approach for young children and their families. The project is a collaborative effort led by the state Council on Children and Families, Department of Health, Office of Mental Health, and Office of Children and Family Services, and several partner organizations in Westchester County.

Project LAUNCH Goals

At the state level:

• Monitor, evaluate, and ensure a public health approach and implementation model
• Support fidelity to this model and to the vision outlined in the state's Early Childhood Plan and Children's Plan, i.e., to build on and expand existing services in order to provide a full range of developmentally supportive services to the three project communities
• Strengthen partnerships between the mental health community and all child-serving systems (including primary care settings) to enable families to obtain needed supports, tools, and treatment regardless of what “door they enter”
• Adopt a developmental framework across child-serving agencies that supports children and their families through both normative and unanticipated life transitions, including early identification and intervention
• Increase access to evidence-based practices, and support providers' capacity to implement effective practices through technical assistance, funding, and quality improvement efforts
• Provide effective and culturally competent services via training and technical assistance

At the local level:

• Enhance infrastructure and services through a multi-tiered approach
• Develop systems and policy activities, for example, by creating a Young Child Wellness Council with members who will recommend, enact, and advocate for policy change
• Use environmental approaches, such as a broad-based health promotion/social marketing campaign to raise awareness about and influence young child wellness, or workforce development to enhance capacity among early childhood providers
• Increase direct services for individual families and children, such as home visiting, coordinated/integrated health care, parenting education, and family support services

Strategies

These goals will be achieved by using an ecological design that includes social-emotional developmental screenings in natural settings—i.e., health care clinics, educational facilities, child care settings, and Head Start programs. The design will incorporate components of several early childhood initiatives in Westchester County: 4-Our Children, a screening program for children in primary care; Early Step Forward, technical assistance and support for early child care staff, parents, and caregivers; Family Ties, a multifaceted family support initiative; and home visiting, programs targeting both children and caregivers and the Westchester Community Network.

Specific evidenced-based practices and programs will be used to implement Second Step, a classroom-based social skills program; Common Sense Parenting, parenting skill enhancement focused on behavior management; Strengthening Families, a family skills education program to increase resilience and reduce risk; Healthy Families–New York, home visiting services for mothers during pregnancy and for their child's first five years; and Parent-Child Home Program, a home visiting model for low-income, low-literacy families with multiple risks.

Expected Outcomes

At the state level, there will be a shared vision for the wellness of young children that drives the development of networks for the coordination of key child-serving systems and the integration of behavioral and physical health services. Children will thrive in safe, supportive environments and will enter school ready to learn and able to succeed.

Locally, Project LAUNCH seeks to create a comprehensive, coordinated system for young children that will promote positive early childhood development in order to support health, well-being, and school readiness for all children in a culturally sensitive, holistic way, with services delivered in natural environmental settings, including doctors' offices, schools, and community health centers. Expected outcomes include the development of a comprehensive plan for child wellness; increased awareness of and efforts toward child wellness among caregivers of young children as a result of effective campaigns and social marketing; an increase in expertise among the early childhood workforce; alignment of systems of care that integrate behavioral health into primary care settings; and an increase in parental skill levels as a result of home visiting and parent education programs. Direct services will be provided to 800 children per year, 3,500 over the entire project period. The 4-Our Children program expects to serve 50 families per year, 250 over the entire project period. Healthy Families–New York anticipates serving 45 children and their families each year, 225 over the entire project period.

Evidence-Based Programs :
Common Sense Parenting
Parent-Child Home Program (PCHP)
Second Step
Strengthening Families Program
Healthy Families