Frontiers of Innovation Projects

Program Description: Attachment Vitamins (AV) is a 10-session strength-based and trauma-informed parenting education intervention for parents of children aged 0-5. AV aims to provide a supportive environment in which parents can learn about early childhood development and the impact of chronic stress and trauma in order to help them attune to their child’s needs, strengthen the parent-child relationship, set realistic parenting goals, and understand and respond to challenging behaviors.

Current Project Description: This project was selected and funded by Best Starts for Kids (BSK). The current project will explore the feasibility of offering Attachment Vitamins (AV) in at least three different sites serving at-risk, low- income, and culturally diverse families. Sites being considered include a family homeless shelter, a pediatric clinic, an early learning/child care center, and a community mental health clinic. All sites will be in King County, Washington. The project aims to: 1) study the impact of AV on parent reflective functioning and emotional regulation, overall parenting stress, and parent-child interactions; and 2) reduce barriers limiting parent participation in an AV group.

Project Type: Feasibility Study
Current Setting/Context: Adult-Focused Group (out of home)
Primary Design Principle(s): Strengthen Core Life Skills, Support Responsive Relationships
Project Team(s): Navos
Geographic Location: King County, Washington

Program Description: The Best4Babies program offers a support system for newly arrived immigrant and/or refugee mothers geared towards easing their transition to being parents in the United States. The program expanded to and is currently working with 6 different community groups: Swahili, Arabic, French, Dari, Maimai (Somali-Bantu) and English (from majority English speaking African countries) The program incorporates a number of strategies, including home visiting, mobile advocacy, language interpretation, communicating remotely over the phone, monthly support groups for mothers and fathers, drop-in childcare, and culturally appropriate gifts.

Current Project Description: This project was selected and funded by Best Starts for Kids (BSK). The current project is designed to pilot the program with an initial group of Swahili-speaking moms and incorporate their feedback, prior to scaling up the program to be offered to other groups. Feedback will be gathered by asking each of the mothers individually about their experiences in and reactions to the program. This pilot will also begin to explore for whom the program is working and why, so as to best adapt the program offerings for all those enrolled.

Project Type: Pilot
Current Setting/Context: Community
Primary Design Principle(s): Reduce Sources of Stress, Support Responsive Relationships
Project Team(s): Children’s Home Society of Washington
Geographic Location: King County, Washington

Program Description: The Birth Bundle Project (BBP) is a collaborative care community at the Rainier Valley Midwives aimed at expanding access to innovative perinatal care. The program aims to serve traditionally marginalized families in the South Seattle and South King County area, specifically immigrant, refugee, and families of color. The midwifery-led model creates a client-centered health care team of midwives, doctors, and doulas who support families and newborns before, during, and after birth. The program is designed to bridge existing gaps between service providers and offer wrap-around prenatal and postnatal services to clients.

Current Project Description: This project was selected and funded by Best Starts for Kids (BSK). The current project is designed to gather feedback from both practitioners and clients involved with the Birth Bundle Project, with the overall intent to use this qualitative feedback to improve the program.

Project Type: Planning & Development Project
Current Setting/Context: Clinic or Pediatric
Primary Design Principle(s): Reduce Sources of Stress, Support Responsive Relationships
Project Team(s): Rainier Valley Midwives
Geographic Location: King County, Washington

Program Description: Zeno MathWays is an early math family engagement program that leverages strategic community partners and the home environment to provide strong math experiences and resources for preschool aged children and their families.

Current Project Description: This project was selected and funded by Best Starts for Kids (BSK). The goal of this pilot is to refine a model for Family Childcare (FCC) providers through a co-creation process in at least one targeted community in South King County. The first round of implementation is piloting the FCC adaptation with East African childcare providers, in partnership with Horn of Africa Services. The project aims to understand the specific needs and challenges in this community, with the goal of co-creating a targeted version of the program.

Project Type: Pilot
Current Setting/Context: Home
Primary Design Principle(s): Strengthen Core Life Skills, Support Responsive Relationships
Project Team(s): Horn of Africa Services
Geographic Location: Seattle, Washington

Program Description: Look Listen and Learn (LL+L) produces children’s television to bridge the achievement gap in Washington State so that Black, Indigenous and other children of color enter school ready to learn and able to succeed. Featuring local children and teachers at learning venues across King County, LL+L applies brain development knowledge to foster learning and enhance child/caregiver relationships. LL+L aims to create a fun and educational program featuring those individuals underrepresented in traditional media, shifting the values that BIPOC (and other) children receive by seeing all types of children and adults enjoying learning. The program aspires to having viewers see themselves positively reflected in LL+L, which is thought to help build greater confidence and pride, ultimately supporting children’s readiness to learn.

Current Project Description: This project was selected and funded by Best Starts for Kids (BSK). LL+L has completed filming of a 13-episode season of educational TV programs based in the loving tradition of Mr. Rogers but aimed directly at children/families of color. BIPOC people fill all the onscreen roles for each segment, i.e. art, food/cooking, reading, etc. Each episode is organized around a specific theme, i.e. home, elders, personal boundaries, change, etc. A parent tip concludes each episode. New episodes are released regularly for viewing on YouTube and local public access TV channels. Various evaluation methods and metrics are used to determine if the project is achieving the intended outcomes.

Project Type: Pilot
Current Setting/Context: Online
Primary Design Principle(s): Support Responsive Relationships
Project Team(s): Look, Listen and Learn
Geographic Location: King County, Washington

Program Description: Strive Adaptation for Native Families is the product of a collaboration between Partners for our Children and Cowlitz Tribal Health Seattle. The program aims to improve parent-child visits and maintain parent-child-community bonds by: a) adapting the Strive Supervised Visitation Program to provide culturally tailored parent support and education to Native parents visiting with their children from birth to five years of age; b) planning for and expanding organizational capacity to provide visitation services; c) training staff; and, d) delivering the adapted Strive curriculum to Native parents.

Current Project Description: This project was selected and funded by Best Starts for Kids (BSK). The current project has three primary objectives. First, Partners for Our Children is conducting an extensive stakeholder engagement process through which the study team is gathering information to inform the cultural tailoring of the current program. Simultaneously, Cowlitz Tribal Health Seattle is working to become a supervised visitation provider. Finally, the partnership will collaboratively evaluate process and outcome measures associated with the cultural adaptation, planning and implementation efforts, and the usefulness of the approach in addressing disproportionality in King County.

Project Type: Feasibility Study
Current Setting/Context: Other
Primary Design Principle(s): Support Responsive Relationships
Project Team(s): University of Washington: Partners for our Children in partnership with Cowlitz Tribal Health Services
Geographic Location: King County, Washington

Program Description: The Inclusion Academy is a 2-component program that aims to empower parents and allies of young children with disabilities or developmental delay to expand or create inclusive learning opportunities and promote disability equity. The Inclusion Academy combines a sequence of classes, followed by applying the classroom learning through mentored community projects. The Inclusion Academy emphasizes helping parents understand disability as diversity and the importance of inclusion to healthy development and lifelong outcomes, as well as helping them develop key skills needed to shift provider practices and understanding.

Current Project Description: This project was selected and funded by Best Starts for Kids (BSK). The current project is designed to investigate the appropriate blend of education, skill-building, and support offered through the program that will most effectively achieve desired change in participants, including increased activism, influence, and leadership of change.

Project Type: Pilot
Current Setting/Context: Adult-Focused Group (out of home)
Primary Design Principle(s): Support Responsive Relationships
Project Team(s): The Arc of King County
Geographic Location: King County, Washington

Program Description: The online program entails a psycho-educative intervention for families that have adopted children from zero to six years within the past year. Video modules related to early childhood development and adoption-relevant themes (such as managing adoption expectations and challenges) are sent to families, who also partake in videoconference therapy sessions with a psychologist specialized in adoption.

Current Project Description: The project scope entails program development, feasibility testing and a pilot study with families that have adopted a child (0 to 6 years old) in the last year in São Paulo or Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. First, a feasibility study will be carried out to adapt the script and the content sent to families, through online focus groups. The next cycle will include a second feasibility test with 3 to 5 families, testing the first version of the videos, prior to implementation of the full pilot study with 50 families (n=50).

Project Type: Pilot
Current Setting/Context: Online Setting
Primary Design Principle(s): Reduce Sources of Stress, Support Responsive Relationships
Project Team(s): Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul
Geographic Location: Rio Grande do Sul and São Paulo, Brazil

Program Description: The program provides educational information and materials for preschool educators to support play-based learning and early language development, via an interactive chatbot (WhatsApp and Web), in accordance with Brazil’s National Curricula Standards (BNCC – Base Nacional Comum Curricular) and the National Literacy Plan (PNA). Teachers will be able to converse and pose questions to the chatbot, as well as access an archive of curated content, relevant to their needs, within the interactive and engaging platform.

Current Project Description: The project includes two feasibility tests, covering the usability and relevance of the chatbot as well as the available content. Subsequently, a pilot study will include program implementation among teachers (n=40) in public preschools (children ages 4 to 6 years old) located in vulnerable neighborhoods of Florianópolis, with a period of three months of chatbot usage.

Project Type: Pilot
Current Setting/Context: Online
Primary Design Principle(s): Strengthen Core Life Skills
Project Team(s): Domlexia
Geographic Location: Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, Brazil

Program Description: An intervention committed to reducing sources of toxic stress arising from racism and discriminatory practices within early childhood education settings, negatively impacting black children in Brazil in particular. The program involves a training module for daycare, preschool and kindergarten teachers, available through a cell phone application that provides content and concepts about race relations, with practical suggestions for their work with children in everyday life (representativeness, games, stories, etc.).

Current Project Description: This pilot study is in its initial planning and developmental stages, which will be followed by feasibility tests and a pilot study. The pilot study will test the intervention model with early childhood educators (n=50) in daycares, preschools and kindergartens (children ages 0 to 5 years old) in low-income, urban neighborhoods within São Paulo.

Project Type: Pilot
Current Setting/Context: Online
Primary Design Principle(s): Reduce Sources of Stress
Project Team(s): Centro de Estudos das Relações de Trabalho e Desigualdades (Center on the Study and Relationship of Work and Inequality)
Geographic Location: São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

Program Description: A universal remote video coaching parenting program to strengthen positive mother-child interactions and to enhance mothers’ awareness about the power of positive interactions during play situations in the home setting. The program utilizes personalized videos sent via WhatsApp that combine animation with clips of the mother and child engaging in a positive play dynamic.

Current Project Description: The aim of this next cycle focuses on furthering the implementation and evaluation of the Strengthening Bonds program with vulnerable mothers and their children (ages 2-5) living in stressful and violent environments in Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brazil. The methodology included mothers’ self-observations with positive feedback, together with animation explaining about interactions with reciprocity, responsiveness, and directivity. (RCT: 40/40)

Project Type: Later-Stage Study
Current Setting/Context: Online
Primary Design Principle(s): Support Responsive Relationships
Project Team(s): School of Medicine at the University of São Paulo (FMRP-USP)
Geographic Location: Ribeirão Preto, São Paulo, Brazil

Program Description: The home-visiting program aims to guide mothers with infants (1 to 4 months) in using maternal singing as part of their daily care routines using positive feedback strategies, in attempts to strengthen responsive behaviors during mother-baby interactions. The interventions will be performed by a multidisciplinary team during home visits, utilizing the musical repertoire of mothers based on maternal episodic and positive childhood memories.

Current Project Description: At this stage, the project is in planning, development and training phases, and will later conduct feasibility tests and a pilot study. The pilot study will occur within a vulnerable, rural community in the state of Acre, Brazil, amongst mothers (n=45) with infants.

Project Type: Pilot
Current Setting/Context: Home
Primary Design Principle(s): Support Responsive Relationships
Project Team(s): Federal University of Acre
Geographic Location: Bujari, Acre, Brazil

Program Description: A play-focused online program designed to develop adult capabilities to interact with children in support of healthy child development. Caregivers receive video classes, and text and audio messages via WhatsApp to demonstrate opportunities to integrate play into daily routines, using resources available. The program is designed to be a low-cost, scalable resource.

Current Project Description: This late-stage pilot study is implementing and evaluating the Play Teaches Change program at child care centers outside São Paulo with center staff attending children between the 12 and 23 months in a randomized control trial (50pp intervention / 50pp control group).

Project Type: Later-Stage Study
Current Setting/Context: Childcare Setting
Primary Design Principle(s): Strengthen Core Life Skills, Support Responsive Relationships
Project Team(s): Tempojunto
Geographic Location: São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

Program Description: A capacity-building program for community clinics that trains obstetrics staff to incorporate elements of the Wellness in Your Pregnancy approach, including mindfulness and a focus on attachment, into their regular appointments and consultations with young pregnant women facing adversity. The program seeks to reduce stress during pregnancy, support the development of a strong prenatal bond with the baby, and (when possible) strengthen the women’s relationships with their own mothers to build a supportive and nurturing caregiving partnership.

Current Project Description: This feasibility study will assess the feasibility and acceptability of an adaptation of the original, group-based Wellness in Your Pregnancy program that builds capacity within a community health clinic in Mexico City to incorporate elements of the program into clinic consultations.

Project Type: Feasibility Study
Current Setting/Context: Clinic or Pediatric
Primary Design Principle(s): Reduce Sources of Stress, Support Responsive Relationships
Project Team(s): DEI Comunidad
Geographic Location: Mexico City, Mexico

Program Description: With high rates of migratory work in these two Puebla communities, this program strives to help families maintain connections while living apart. The program combines ECD workshops for caregivers with weekly, playful web calls with children and their migratory parent or caregiver guided by a trained educator to maintain a strong connection.

Current Project Description: This pilot study involves families with children age 3-6 years in two rural communities in Puebla state. It will evaluate the impact of the program (workshops and guided calls) on parent-child interactions and relationships.

Project Type: Pilot Study
Current Setting/Context: Home or Center
Primary Design Principle(s): Support Responsive Relationships
Project Team(s): Fundación Juconi
Geographic Location: Chietla & Santa Cruz Cuautomatitla, Puebla, Mexico

Program Description: In a community with high rates of poverty and few social supports, the Crecemos DIJO organization constructed a children’s library and now offers monthly workshops to build caregiver capacity and knowledge in social, emotional, and cognitive development, as well as to inspire families to visit and use the library. The project aims to support mother-child attachment and early development overall, setting children up for greater success in school later on.

Current Project Description: This pilot study involves families with children age 3-5 years in Magdalena Jaltepec, Oaxaca. It will assess the impact of the program’s workshops on mother-child attachment, childrearing practices, and early development overall.

Project Type: Pilot Study
Current Setting/Context: Center
Primary Design Principle(s): Strengthen Core Life Skills, Build Responsive Relationships
Project Team(s): Crecemos DIJO
Geographic Location: Magdalena Jaltepec, Oaxaca, Mexico

Program Description: Weekly virtual workshops in which caretakers build their capacity to engage in nurturing, responsive interactions with their infants through play.

Current Project Description: This pilot study involves parents and caregivers working in the informal sector in Mexico City. It will explore the impact of the program’s virtual workshops on parent-child interactions and attachment.

Project Type: Pilot Study
Current Setting/Context: Online
Primary Design Principle(s): Build Responsive Relationships
Project Team(s): Enseña por México
Geographic Location: Mexico City

Program Description: The Young Parents Program (YPP) is a medical home for teen parents and their young children with embedded social work supports. Each family has a primary care physician and social worker who together meet the medical, social, and mental health needs of families.

Current Project Description: In the context of the Young Parents Program medical home, this team is proposing a new innovation to improve toddlers’ age-normed executive functioning (EF) skills. They will deliver a set of brief, reflective modules for patients’ caregivers (typically a teen parent) during the toddler well child visits between 24-48 months. The sessions—led by social workers—will specifically focus on the importance of cognitive flexibility, working memory, and inhibitory control, within the context of school-readiness. Caregivers will leave with a recommended set of activities or an “experience” (such as a museum visit) to try before the next visit. A one month phone-based follow-up after the initial educational session will present an opportunity for the parent to reflect on any changes in knowledge or behavior. They plan to deliver 1-2 modules total per patient over a 6 month window. During the study period they plan to enroll a cohort of 25 patient-parent pairs.

Project Type: Pilot
Current Setting/Context: Clinic or Pediatric
Primary Design Principle(s): Strengthen Core Life Skills
Project Team(s): Boston Children’s Hospital
Geographic Location: Boston, Massachusetts

Program Description: UNM YCHC has an integrated Home Visitation Program that reflects their overall strengths-based trauma-informed care approach, within an attachment- and relationship-based model. Three home visitors serve fifty families, from prenatal to 3 years of age.

Current Project Description: This innovation will be offered to families in the home visiting program, and is built around a key question: how might we develop a sense of community and break isolation for culturally diverse families participating in our home visiting program? The project will offer a caregiver support group that aims to target this question by bringing families together to provide group education and support. The groups will at first be coordinated and led by the home visitors, but will progressively transfer coordination and ownership of the group to the families themselves, with home visitors facilitating as needed. The groups will meet every 2 weeks at first, but as the families begin coordinating the group they may choose to meet on a different schedule. Groups will run for a three month period at a location designated by the group. Home visitor coordination will assist in bringing in guest speakers and/or subject area experts if needed, as well as help facilitate group “field trips” to various social service agencies. The group will be loosely formatted and structured to accommodate both an interest in teaching the key scientific principles, as well as the topics of interest to the families that are participating. It is important that the program responds to participant input and changing needs, seeks to empower families with tools for self-advocacy, and embraces and reflects values of multicultural and linguistically diverse participants.

Project Type: Feasibility Study
Current Setting/Context: Community
Primary Design Principle(s): Support Responsive Relationships
Project Team(s): Univerisity of New Mexico: Young Children’s Health Clinic (UNM YCHC)
Geographic Location: Trumbull Village Neighborhood, New Mexico

Program Description: HealthySteps is an evidence-based, interdisciplinary pediatric primary care program that ensures babies and toddlers receive positive parenting and have healthy development. A child development professional, known as a HealthySteps Specialist (HS Specialist), offers screening and support for common and complex concerns that physicians often lack time to address, including feeding, behavior, sleep, attachment, depression, family needs, and adapting to life with a baby or young child. HS Specialists are trained to provide families with parenting guidance, support between visits, referrals, and care coordination, all specific to each family’s needs.

Current Project Description: The focus of this project is on initial implementation of the HealthySteps program within two of Children’s Pediatric Primary Care Clinics. Families and patients seen in these clinics often experience significant barriers to care, growth, and development that may exceed the time and tools available to the pediatrician alone. And while Children’s general pediatrics clinics currently provide a wide range of support resources to help reduce barriers and improve outcomes, they continue to see at-risk families experiencing gaps in well-child checks, vaccinations, and health maintenance. It is important to note that these disparities occur across income and ethnic groups. Initially, the team intends to use psychologists and social workers currently embedded through their Integrated Behavioral Health Department as HealthySteps Specialists who will connect with families during well-child visits within the first month of life as part of the primary care team. The HealthySteps Specialist will offer screening and support for both common and complex concerns including feeding, behavior, sleep, attachment, depression, social determinants of health, and adapting to life with a baby or young child. The HealthySteps Specialists will be available to provide families from birth to age 5 with parenting guidance, support between visits, and referrals, all specific to the needs of the family and patient.

Project Type: Pilot
Current Setting/Context: Clinic or Pediatric
Primary Design Principle(s): Support Responsive Relationships
Project Team(s): Children’s Hospital and Clinics of Minnesota
Geographic Location: Minneapolis, Minnesota

Program Description: HealthySteps is an evidence-based, interdisciplinary pediatric primary care program that ensures babies and toddlers receive positive parenting and have healthy development. A child development professional, known as a HealthySteps Specialist (HS Specialist), offers screening and support for common and complex concerns that physicians often lack time to address, including feeding, behavior, sleep, attachment, depression, family needs, and adapting to life with a baby or young child. HS Specialists are trained to provide families with parenting guidance, support between visits, referrals, and care coordination, all specific to each family’s needs.

Current Project Description: The project team is interested in learning more about the impact of psychosocial complexity on the efficacy of their intervention on families who receive Tier 3 services, who are referred for psychosocial stressors and/or pediatrician concern about the parent-child relationship. In Tier 3, a HS Specialist conducts team-based well-child visits with parents and their babies and young children with the physician. In these visits, the HSS offers the family written materials and verbal guidance around developmental topics of note pertinent to that child’s age. The HS Specialist supports screening materials that may need to be completed based on the child’s age as well. HealthySteps utilizes visit guides that offer an outline of developmental milestones, parent discussion topics, and safety checklists for every well-child visit. However, the HS Specialist is always prepared to meet the needs of the family where they are on that particular day and can adjust the content of the visit as such.

Project Type: Pilot
Current Setting/Context: Clinic or Pediatric
Primary Design Principle(s): Reduce Sources of Stress, Strengthen Core Life Skills
Project Team(s): Montefiore Medical Group
Geographic Location: Bronx, New York

Program Description: The Partnerships for Families Navigator program focuses on building on the work of the CHLA/AltaMed Family Advocacy Support Team (FAST). FAST will be enhanced with the integration of a Partnerships for Families Navigator (PFN) located at the CHLA/AltaMed, 3rd & Westlake clinic.

Current Project Description: The aim of the Partnerships for Families Navigator Early Stage Pilot Study is to establish a warm hand-off from the pediatric clinic to the Partnerships For Families (PFF) prenatal to 5 program through the community based organization, Para Los Niños. The PFN program is designed for parents and guardians of CHLA/AltaMed, 3rd & Westlake patients (birth to 12 months) who screen positive for maternal depression on the PHQ screen during well child visits, screen positive on the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression scale during a lactation clinic, or who identify maternal depression symptoms to their child’s provider during other clinic visits. If a parent/guardian screens at risk for maternal depression, the physician or FAST staff will walk the parent/guardian to the resource desk in the waiting room where the Navigator will be located. The Navigator creates a direct referral/enrollment or locates a PFF program closer to the family’s home. The Navigator provides referral forms to FAST staff for follow up. PFF workshops and classes will also be held at CHLA/AltaMed clinic for easy access for patient families.

Project Type: Pilot
Current Setting/Context: Clinic or Pediatric
Primary Design Principle(s): Reduce Sources of Stress
Project Team(s): Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, Para Los Ninos
Geographic Location: Los Angeles, California

Program Description: Play to Learn (P2L) is an intensive 10-week course where parents learn how to support their child’s school readiness through interactive play that fosters brain development. Parents attend P2L classes with their young child between 2-3 years of age, and receive one-on-one coaching from facilitators. The facilitators provide real-time feedback concerning cognitive issues, interactions with other children and parent/child communication. Classes are offered at the clinic in the community rooms which are converted into a classroom with various activity centers.

Current Project Description: This team is focusing their project work to address the issues families have when multiple caregivers are involved with a child. The project entails coaching one parent to assist with communicating with the non-attending parent the importance of the skills and activities learned in class to be practiced at home. They believe this will have a greater impact on families, as families have communicated extended family members or the parent not in attendance being a barrier to improvement in behavior and/or building skills. One parent is often discouraged or contradicted by another caregiver when trying to teach their child a certain skill or appropriate behavior.

Project Type: Pilot
Current Setting/Context: Clinic or Pediatric
Primary Design Principle(s): Support Responsive Relationships
Project Team(s): People’s Community Clinic
Geographic Location: Austin, Texas

Program Description: This new program offers an additional follow-up visit for parents and children following the 18-month well child visit, designed to focus on supporting healthy reciprocal interactions between caregivers and children. The additional appointment is administered by a child development specialist who observes a structured book-sharing activity for child and caregiver either in clinic or during a home visit. Based on the observation, families may be invited to return for additional visits, or may be referred to services such as Parents as Teachers and Early Intervention.

Current Project Description: The initial pilot project will focus on questions of acceptability for both caregivers and pediatricians, and will also begin to explore initial changes in targets. The team is particularly interested in gauging families’ willingness and ability to schedule and attend additional appointments, and will explore some new survey methods to assess parent responsiveness and sense of agency.

Project Type: Pilot
Current Setting/Context: Clinic or Pediatric
Primary Design Principle(s): Strengthen Core Life Skills, Support Responsive Relationships
Project Team(s): MGH Revere HealthCare Center
Geographic Location: Revere, Massachusetts

Program Description: For over 45 years, AVANCE has been dedicated to providing high quality, innovative, two-generation education and support programming for low-income Latinx children and families.

Current Project Description: In 2019, the AVANCE team identified that their core program, the Parent-Child Education Program (PCEP), was in need of innovation before starting to scale. With current opportunities for growth, the team wants to ensure that their decisions about the future are strategic, sustainable, and are meeting market demand. In the Scaling Impact Portfolio, this team proposed a two-pronged project that requires technical assistance and capacity in both science, regarding PCEP innovation, and strategy, for developing a business model for scale.

Project Type: Transition to Scale
Current Setting/Context: Parent-Child Center Setting
Primary Design Principle(s): Support Responsive Relationships
Project Team(s): AVANCE
Geographic Location: San Antonio, Texas

Program Description: The Brain Builders Parenting Course (BBPC) aims to empower pregnant women and mothers of children age 0-1 who face adversity to support their children’s neurological and cognitive development in a safe, supportive environment. BBPC will be delivered through a series of online courses to women in Houston and Harris County, TX.

Current Project Description: Six-session feasibility and pilot studies of the Brain Builders Parenting Course model will be delivered online to women living in Houston and Harris County, TX

Project Type: Feasibility Study
Current Setting/Context: Clinic or Pediatric
Primary Design Principle(s): Reduce Sources of Stress, Support Responsive Relationships
Project Team(s): Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy
Geographic Location: Houston, Texas

Program Description: Brain Lab is offered one hour/week throughout the school year and has three components: 1) an educational activity that prepares parents to engage in a parent-child activity focused on promoting serve-and-return interactions; 2) a parent-child interactive session in which parents practice the activity they learned about; 3) a debriefing session with parents that includes reflective discussion about the activity.

Current Project Description: The current project entails a nine-month feasibility study, preceded by a three-month planning and development phase. The planning and development phase is designed to train staff in the implementation guide and in the use of the measurement tools, recruit and enroll families, and develop program materials. The purpose of the feasibility study is to assess the viability of the program strategies and to assess the potential to recruit and retain enough participants for a subsequent small-scale pilot.

Project Type: Feasibility Study
Current Setting/Context: Other
Primary Design Principle(s): Support Responsive Relationships
Project Team(s): The Family Place
Geographic Location: Norwich, Vermont

Program Description: Bridge to Preschool (BtP) is an early intervention program designed for children in need of additional language and social-emotional development support prior to 3-year-old preschool. Children who attend are enrolled in The Primary School, which serves families who reflect the racial diversity of the East Palo Alto community and are living below the median income level of the county. Children are identified for the program based on the results of the ASQ-3 and ASQ-SE screening tools, parent and staff observations, and/or an existing diagnosis. The program is a weekly 90-minute parent-child group that meets at The Primary School and is broken into two modular components: one focused on language skills and the second focused on social-emotional skills. Language sessions entail 60 minutes of play-based opportunities to practice typical home routines where language can be built and expanded, as well as community circle, snack, and shared reading time. During social-emotional sessions, parents and children participate for 60 minutes in a typical preschool morning routine of centers, circle time, snack, and outdoor time. Both components include a 30-minute parent-only discussion group where parents learn specific strategies to support their child’s language and social-emotional development.

Current Project Description: The current pilot study is implementing and evaluating an adapted version of the Bridge to Preschool program with parent-child dyads prior to entering preschool within the Primary School in East Palo Alto, California. It builds on a previous pilot study examining the impact of a version of Bridge to Preschool that only included a social-emotional component, which did not find the expected improvements on children’s language skills. Based on this learning, the program was strategically adapted to include a language component and expand the parent-only discussion group to prioritize and more explicitly focus on specific strategies for parents to support their child’s language and social-emotional development.

Project Type: Pilot
Current Setting/Context: School
Primary Design Principle(s): Strengthen Core Life Skills, Support Responsive Relationships
Project Team(s): The Primary School
Geographic Location: East Palo Alto, California

Program Description: Trauma-informed training for early childhood education (ECE) providers; an adaptation of the Hand-in-Hand parenting program for preschool classrooms

Current Project Description: 6-week feasibility study of the Hand-in-Hand adaptation for ECE providers at two sites: Southern New Hampshire Services (SNHS) Child Development Program and the National Child Research Center (NCRC) Preschool in Washington, DC. Educators participate in weekly 90-minute mentoring calls for up to six educators per class. Between 10-20 educators will participate in the feasibility study. Participants will also access an hour each of instructional videos and written materials weekly.

Project Type: Feasibility Study
Current Setting/Context: Online
Primary Design Principle(s): Strengthen Core Life Skills, Support Responsive Relationships
Project Team(s): Hand in Hand Parenting
Geographic Location: Washington, DC and Southern New Hampshire

Program Description: Transforming healthcare delivery and outcomes for all families by expanding access to Centering group visits.

Current Project Description: This team is part of the Scaling Impact Portfolio. Together with the Center, they aim to align CenteringParenting® with the science and develop impact and scaling strategies that further the awareness and adoption of Centering among family medicine and pediatric care providers.

Project Type: Transition to Scale
Current Setting/Context: Clinic or Pediatric
Primary Design Principle(s): Reduce Sources of Stress, Support Responsive Relationships
Project Team(s): Centering Healthcare Institute
Geographic Location: Boston, Massachusetts, with staff across the United States

Program Description: Hybrid observation and game-based assessment platform for school readiness that saves teachers time and supports instruction and individualization.

Current Project Description: This team is part of the Scaling Impact Portfolio. Cognitive ToyBox (CTB) develops research-backed technology to make assessment easy and actionable for early childhood educators. To date, CTB’s work focused on supporting center and school-based providers. For this project, CTB explored the feasibility of expanding into a new market: home-based family child care providers. The CTB team worked with a community partner to pilot the CTB assessment with nine family child care providers over the course of six months. Focus groups were conducted with the providers to gather feedback on their experience. This feedback will be used by the CTB team to refine and adapt their technology to better support the needs of family child care providers.

Project Type: Transition to Scale
Current Setting/Context: Childcare Setting
Primary Design Principle(s): Strengthen Core Life Skills, Support Responsive Relationships
Project Team(s): Cognitive ToyBox
Geographic Location: Brooklyn, New York

Program Description: Joyful Together^TM -Early Care and Education (ECE)- developed by OhioGuidestone, is designed to build child resiliency and reduce early childhood professional stress by infusing relationships with joy and play. The model puts into action the science behind attachment and play and equips ECE professionals with the tools to improve the quantity and quality of joyful interactions with young children with the goal of preventing and addressing the negative effects of childhood adversity and toxic stress.

Current Project Description: This pilot study is implementing and evaluating Joyful Together Early Care and Education at early care & education centers in Cuyahoga County (Greater Cleveland, OH) that serve children 6 weeks to 6 years old.

Project Type: Pilot
Current Setting/Context: Childcare Setting
Primary Design Principle(s): Support Responsive Relationships
Project Team(s): OhioGuidestone
Geographic Location: Cuyahoga County, Ohio

Program Description: The LUME Approach is a framework which focuses on understanding and supporting healthy emotional development in children and adults. The program’s structure includes, over approximately five months, 24 hours of interactive coursework through four six-hour sessions and interspersed small group reflective meetings. Although the program is primarily utilized with early childhood practitioners working with children ages 0 to 5, the program can serve educators of any age students. LUME’s Foundations course guides early educators’ intentional reflection on children’s emotional development, their own emotional development, temperaments, family histories, and environmental influences through the topic areas of Emotional Milestones, Mirroring, Next Generation Discipline and Early Literacy. (Emotional Milestones explores attachment and other milestones of emotional development. Mirroring helps educators cultivate concrete tools for emotional partnerships with children. Next Generation Discipline helps educators dissect children’s mischief, identify underlying emotions, and develop effective responses. Early Literacy helps educators understand the links between literacy and emotional development.)

Current Project Description: Pilot Study with three concurrent learning communities of approximately 20 early educators each to examine if the LUME Foundations course and its impact on early educators targeted knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors in the classroom. Research questions include:

• Do educators emerge with enhanced professional identity?
• Do they recognize that their own history impacts their practice?
• Do they recognize and prioritize emotionally responsive practices with the children in their care?
• Do they have a shift in perception around “challenging behavior” and a reduction in stigma around mental health supports and conversations?
• Do educators engage in increased self-reflection and willing vulnerability?

Project Type: Pilot
Current Setting/Context: School
Primary Design Principle(s): Support Responsive Relationships
Project Team(s): LUME Institute
Geographic Location: St Louis, Missouri

Program Description: New Moms partners with young moms (24 and under) and their children in Chicagoland, using a 2-Generation approach to building economic mobility and family well-being. New Moms uses the brain and behavioral science of Executive Skills and a Family-Centered Coaching model to engage young moms experiencing poverty in Job Training, Housing, and Family Support programs (including Home Visiting and Doula services). Together with their coaches, young moms create, progress towards, and achieve the goals they set for their families.

Current Project Description: This team is part of the Scaling Impact Portfolio. In their current work, New Moms will scale their Executive Skills coaching strategies from Job Training into their Family Support and Housing programs. They believe that adapting Executive Skills strategies may reduce parenting stress, improve parent-child relationships, and help participants set and progress towards their goals. Scaling Executive Skills agency-wide will strengthen their coaching foundation as they continue prototyping to build supplemental coaching technology post-Fellowship.

Project Type: Transition to Scale
Current Setting/Context: Home
Primary Design Principle(s): Reduce Sources of Stress, Strengthen Core Life Skills
Project Team(s): New Moms
Geographic Location: Chicago, Illinois

Program Description: Play for Success is an intervention designed to support caregivers in teaching strategies to explore objects to their infants with the goal of strengthening their focused attention and problem solving skills, both important indicators of executive functioning later in life.

Current Project Description: This later-stage study builds on the findings of a pilot study that compared the impact of three conditions: teaching multiple object exploration strategies, teaching only two strategies repeatedly, and engaging in play without explicitly teaching any strategies. This pilot found that infants who were taught two strategies repeatedly showed the greatest improvement. The current later-stage study is examining the impact of teaching two strategies repeatedly with greater methodological rigor by comparing infants who are randomly assigned to receive the intervention to those who are assigned to a control group that receives the intervention later.

Project Type: Later-Stage Study
Current Setting/Context: Home
Primary Design Principle(s): Strengthen Core Life Skills
Project Team(s): Children’s Home Society of Washington & Whitman College
Geographic Location: Washington State

Program Description: The Reflective Group Supervision (RGS) Project is an innovative approach to building staff capacity in a variety of settings serving children and families. RGS expands on an individual reflective supervision model by extending it to groups of 8-10 staff and integrating a focus on both the emotional demands of the work as well as the application of conceptual frameworks that lead to high quality clinical interventions with parents/caregivers and children.

Current Project Description: The plan is to conduct eight RGS sessions at four programs serving families with infants and toddlers who are also implementing Ackerman Institute for Family’s parenting curricula (Bright Beginnings and Personal Best). The aims of this combined feasibility and early-stage pilot study are (1) to determine how Institute faculty who have been trained in the five-year old RGS model can implement the approach with fidelity; and (2) to test the feasibility of training supervisors in the field.

Project Type: Pilot
Current Setting/Context: Adult-Focused Group (out of home)
Primary Design Principle(s): Reduce Sources of Stress, Strengthen Core Life Skills
Project Team(s): Ackerman Institute for the Family
Geographic Location: New York, New York

Program Description: A scalable preschool-readiness and parent support program for young children (0-3) and their parents to learn side-by-side.

Current Project Description: This project is an Early Stage Pilot Study. VOCEL has evidence that the Child Parent Academy is feasible and acceptable as evidenced by it being in its second and third year at two locations, enrolling parents primarily on a word-of-mouth basis and past participant testimonials of the program. VOCEL has some evidence to suggest that targets have changed in the anticipated direction at their first and second sites. Given recent work the team has done to refine their theory of change–which resulted in the identification of new targets–and the expansion of the program to several more sites, VOCEL is using this project as an opportunity to re-examine whether targets are moving in the anticipated direction across the Child Parent Academy’s 14-18 sites.

Project Type: Pilot
Current Setting/Context: School
Primary Design Principle(s): Strengthen Core Life Skills, Support Responsive Relationships
Project Team(s): VOCEL
Geographic Location: Chicago, Illinois

Program Description: A new program based on Attachment Vitamins–a 10-week psycho-educational parenting group program that addresses the effects of toxic stress and trauma on parenting and child development–that has been culturally adapted for the Colville Tribes’ context.

Current Project Description: The project will include two components: a feasibility study of the Attachment Vitamins (AV) parent group program on the Colville Tribes Reservation and a planning and development period for a cultural adaptation of the program. The target population for the feasibility study will be parents/caregivers of children under the age of six living on the Colville Tribes Reservation in north-central Washington. The sample will consist of volunteer members of the target population recruited through the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), and behavior health offices, as well as Head Start in Nespelem, WA. The implementation setting for the feasibility study will be the Administration building in Nespelem. The planning and development period will take place through regular virtual meetings among team members and several in-person meetings on the Reservation.

Project Type: Feasibility Study
Current Setting/Context: Adult-Focused Group (out of home)
Primary Design Principle(s): Support Responsive Relationships
Project Team(s): Colville Tribes, Washington State University–Vancouver, and University of Washington
Geographic Location: Nespelem, Washington