Our Impact | Help Me Grow National Center

Help Me Grow makes a measurable difference for children, families, and the systems that support them.

By connecting families to the right resources at the right time, HMG ensures children can thrive and communities use their resources wisely. Affiliates across the country demonstrate that when systems work together, families are better served, outcomes improve, and investments go further.

The results speak for themselves.

Reaching Families Nationwide

30 states and D.C. operating over 140 Help Me Grow systems across the country.
1.1 million people reached by Help Me Grow last year alone.

Delivering Results Families Can Feel

In 2024, affiliates reported an average linkage rate of 73%.
87% of families said HMG met their needs — a powerful sign of how effective HMG’s support, linkage, and follow-up is.

A Smart Investment

For every $1 invested, Help Me Grow generates $3–$5 in savings.
Over time, the potential return can be as high as $29, driven by reduced costs in special education, child welfare, and health care.
Cost savings from Help Me Grow are experienced across multiple different sectors including: special education, public assistance (e.g. SNAP, WIC, TANF), child welfare, early intervention, Medicaid, commercial health insurance, and criminal justice.

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Our Strategy

HMG affiliates across the National Affiliate Network implement the HMG Model uniquely, and in a way that best fits their local context. Because of this, our national evaluation approach must be flexible and ongoing, focusing on shared learning and continuous system improvement.

The HMG National Center has the unique capacity to inform a national narrative about the efficacy of HMG as a model to support comprehensive early childhood systems. To do so, the National Center must make effective use of data collected from across the network. Two primary strategies inform the work of the National Center by capturing affiliate progress, identifying best practices, and ensuring continuous learning across the network.

Help Me Grow is not a stand-alone program, but rather a system model that utilizes and builds on existing resources in order to develop and enhance a comprehensive approach to early childhood system-building in any given community so that all young children can thrive. Successful implementation of the Help Me Grow model requires communities to identify existing resources, think creatively about how to make the most of existing opportunities, and build a coalition to work collaboratively toward a shared agenda.

Demonstrating the impact of the Help Me Grow Model across the Affiliate Network is a process that relies on:

HMG affiliates that conduct local evaluations of the efficacy of HMG on community, child and family level outcomes; and
HMG National, which uses findings from both local evaluations and assessment of key lessons learned from across the network to inform a national narrative

Shared Measurement

HMG Impact Indicators tell an important story about the reach and impact of HMG on communities, families, and children across the HMG network. HMG as a system is designed to reach families both within and outside of the centralized access point, child health providers, and community partners. The Impact Indicators that HMG affiliates collect and report to National on an annual basis describe the spread and scale of their efforts in reaching key stakeholders.

National Fidelity Assessment

Fidelity is a critical component of any effort to spread and scale a program or system. Fidelity to the model ensures that the core components that are essential to the HMG model are implemented in a standardized way across the affiliate network.

There is a long period of system growth well before a HMG affiliate would be expected to reach full fidelity to the system model, and during that period, there are critical lessons to be learned and small tests of change that could significantly impact the way a particular system develops. As such, an assessment of fidelity for HMG must be broad, and capture the evolution of HMG across the continuum.

Fidelity to the HMG model is measured according to the stages of implementation consistent with the literature: exploration, installation, implementation, and sustainability. Specific criteria are used to guide classification of an affiliate to a particular stage. The HMG National Center leverages the information obtained through an annual Fidelity Assessment to inform decisions about the structure and content for technical assistance offerings, diffuse key innovations to affiliates in appropriate stages of implementation, and over time, evaluate our impact on supporting affiliate implementation of HMG.