Many young children spend significant time in the care of family, friend, and neighbor (FFN) caregivers, in particular infants and toddlers and children from low-income families. Home visiting models across the country are including FFN caregivers as a strategy for reaching vulnerable children and providing their families with needed services, as well as improving the quality of FFN care.CLASP’s newly released toolkit, Home Away From Home: A Toolkit for Planning Home Visiting Partnerships with Family, Friend, and Neighbor Caregivers, offers help to states exploring partnerships between home visiting and FFN caregivers.
The toolkit includes:
- background on home visiting partnerships and information on available home visiting models and their potential for use in partnership with FFN;
- a planning guide for states to explore home visiting partnerships, including potential policy changes; and
- case studies of existing partnerships between home visiting models and FFN providers. Each case study includes information about the model used, professional development and workforce implications, implementation, challenges, and any available evaluation results.