Help Me Grow Vermont aligns the efforts of early childhood partners to strengthen families and ensure that all children reach their greatest potential. Its services are available to all families statewide who are pregnant or have children from birth through 8 years old. Help Me Grow Vermont’s centralized access point, called the Resource Hub, is operated in partnership with Vermont 2-1-1, a program of the United Ways of Vermont. This partnership ensures that Help Me Grow can plug families and communities into a comprehensive resource grid with accurate information about community services.
Families with young children face significant barriers in finding and accessing services to meet their needs. A complex array of services exists across health, early care and education, economic assistance, and family supports.
In Vermont, partners were looking for a way to align early identification efforts across health, education, and human services providers to detect developmental concerns as early as possible. Like many states, Vermont sought to bridge the gap between screening and service delivery with an equitable, sustainable infrastructure that supports families in navigating service provision across sectors. Key leaders from the Department of Health and the Department of Children and Families were aligned in their support, and Vermont became a statewide affiliate of Help Me Grow in 2015.
The state established Help Me Grow Vermont to strengthen connections using the following approaches:
- Help Me Grow affiliate
- Statewide centralized access point
- Partnership with Vermont 2-1-1
- Developmental and social-emotional screening focus
Read the case study to learn how Vermont operationalized these approaches as well as lessons learned over the course of the work.
Interested in other states’ approaches? Read the other case studies in this series, here.
