Tribal Home Visiting Grantees Submit Benchmarks Data for the First Time

Tribal Home Visiting grantees have worked tirelessly over the last few years to serve families and collect data to demonstrate that their programs are making a difference in the lives of the children and families they serve.

The legislation that created the Tribal Home Visiting program requires grantees to establish “quantifiable, measureable three and five-year benchmarks for demonstrating that the program results in improvements for the eligible families participating in the program” in six benchmark areas, including maternal and child health, children’s school readiness, family economic self-sufficiency, domestic violence, child maltreatment, and coordination of community resources to support families.

There are 36 different “constructs” on which Tribal Home Visiting grantees must develop performance measures, collect data, and report progress to ACF. Grantee performance measures include things like:

• Average number of weeks of breastfeeding among mothers enrolled in the home visiting program
• Average number of yearly visits to emergency care among children enrolled in the program
• Percent of mothers screened for depression
• Percentage of children who are screened on the Ages and Stages Questionnaire-3 at the recommended time points'
• Percent of families enrolled in the program with adequate health insurance

This fall, 13 Cohort 1 Tribal Home Visiting grantees are submitting benchmarks data to ACF for the first time. Through the benchmark data, we have an opportunity to learn more about the progress of our grantees in implementing high quality home visiting programs in their communities. We are excited to review grantees’ submissions and learn more about how they are quantifying their successes!