The Help Me Grow® (HMG) National Center is pleased to announce the receipt of an award from The JPB Foundation to the Office for Community Child Health at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center to support a large, multi-site initiative to enhance the capacity of pediatric primary care practices to mitigate the impact of toxic stress. 
The project’s approach leverages the role of HMG in enabling families to efficiently access culturally appropriate, community-based programs that promote healthy child and family development. The National Center will lead this initiative, in partnership with the Center for the Study of Social Policy, the Child Health and Development Institute, Inc., and existing programs within the Office for Community Child Health.
This three-year project will enable HMG National to learn how to best introduce innovations that build a community’s capacity for collective impact. HMG National will focus on identifying comprehensive and effective strategies for sharing and scaling such innovations. We will include these strategies in our HMG technical assistance activities so that the broader HMG affiliate network can use them to support practice change.
Four Early Childhood-LINC (Learning Innovation Network for Communities) sites have been selected for HMG enhancement within the JPB-funded project. They are:
-Lamoille Valley, Vermont
-Alameda County, California
-Orange County, California
-Palm Beach County, Florida
Recognizing that the pediatric primary care practice is an ideal venue within which to promote resiliency and mitigate the impact of toxic stress, this initiative will rely on a strong partnership betweenHMG affiliates in the above communities and participating primary care practices.
Those practices selected to participate in each community will have access to technical assistance from the HMG National Center in order to engage in a variety of strategies aimed at supporting practice enhancement. Such strategies include a model of practice-based academic detailing, participation in approved Maintenance of Certification (MOC) projects, technical assistance in continuous quality improvement and the Collaborative Improvement and Innovation Network (CoIIN) methodology, and emphasis on the promotion of protective factors to mitigate toxic stress.
The National Center will also work with practices to explore solutions that enhance the collection, tracking, and sharing of information at the interface among pediatric practices, HMG systems, and community-based programs and services. 
We look forward to bringing you additional updates related to this important initiative.