July 2002

Youth Matters has an audacious goal: that every child in the Richmond region will read at grade level by grade three by 2010. Youth Matters pursues this ambitious undertaking via its "Richmond Region Reads…3R Campaign." To achieve the goal, Youth Matters employs multiple proven strategies. One of those is Home Advantage, an effort to integrate literacy into home visitor programs and to grow the programs to scale.

"In the earlier years of the Urban Health Initiative, as Youth Matters made the decision to focus on reading by third grade, the home visitor model emerged as the leading strategy to reach our objective of ensuring that parents are able to be their children's first teachers," says Veronica Templeton, executive director of Youth Matters. In Virginia there are two "brands" of home visitor programs, Healthy Families and CHIP (Children's Health Involving Parents). Healthy Families is a replication of the national model, CHIP is a modified version of the Olds Model teaming paraprofessionals with nurses.

In the City of Richmond, more than 60 percent of children enter kindergarten without the necessary pre-reading skills. Statewide, 25 percent of Virginia's kindergartners and first graders are not ready to learn, and many of these are the very same children who are not reading at grade level in the third grade, according to Joseph Galano, Ph.D., of the College of William and Mary and an expert on child illness prevention and health promotion. Healthy family/home visitor programs are in a unique position to ensure that children are born healthy and enter school ready to learn, he says.

In a statewide evaluation of Healthy Families Virginia, Dr. Galano says the program is effective and that program participants beat state goals with regard to child health, maternal health, child abuse and neglect, and parenting and the home environment. The programs are helping parents to improve parent-child interactions, develop more adequate home environments, and provide more appropriate developmental stimulation for their children, he says. CHIP outcomes are comparable on all indicators.

Youth Matters promotes home visitor programs generally. For example, the Virginia General Assembly recently restored funding in the state budget for CHIP and Healthy Families, in part due to the communication and lobbying efforts of Youth Matters and other active advocacy groups.

In addition, Youth Matters organized an April 2002 forum with national and local experts to discuss the home visitor approach. "We held the forum to galvanize support for taking the home visitor model to scale," says Lisa Specter, deputy director of Youth Matters. 5100 families in the region are eligible each year to be served by the home visitor programs; currently almost 700 Richmond area families receive these services.

Also, Specter says the forum allowed practitioners and researchers to share information and to discuss Galano's recent evaluation of the state program. "Based on research done by the Packard Foundation in 1999, there were some conflicting views on the effectiveness of these programs nationally," she says. "But the local evaluation showed definitively that these programs work."

One forum participant, Bill Roberts, executive director of the Robins Foundation, concurs. "The research shows how important good execution is," he says. "Home visits may seem costly, but when it is done right it is very effective and economical, especially when it is part of a broad community-wide commitment to kids."

In addition to promoting home visitation generally as effective public policy, Youth Matters works, through its Home Advantage strategy, very specifically with home visitor providers to incorporate family literacy into their training and curriculum. As a result of this collaboration, specially-trained staff will go into the homes of Richmond region families, teach the parents and caregivers how to nurture their children, develop their necessary verbal and cognitive pre-reading skills, and give them age-appropriate books and on-going parenting support.

Home Advantage is one component of Youth Matters' 3R Campaign. The others are:

• Preschool Prep: helping childcare providers get kids ready to learn;
• Tutor in Time: helping teachers reinforce lessons for borderline readers;
• Recreational Readers: helping out-of-school programs integrate reading for fun;
• Reach Out and Read: helping healthcare providers prescribe books for kids; and
• Build a Book Bank: helping the community make reading a priority for kids.

For more information on this website about Youth Matters, click here. For more information on this site on early childhood interventions, click here. To visit Youth Matters' website, click here.