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Healthy Families’ mission is to help people be the best parents they can be, making it possible for children to grow up in a safe, healthy and nurtured environment.

Description:
The proposed objectives of Healthy Families include:
• Decrease child abuse and neglect and out-of-home placement.
• Enhance children’s intellectual development.
• Improve parenting skills and children’s emotional health.
• Promote children’s health.
• Encourage achievement of parents.
Healthy Families addresses the needs of parents by offering free, voluntary home visiting by extensively trained and supervised Para-professionals and volunteers. Use of appropriate curriculum and general role modeling will be used to address the above program objectives.

Healthy Families is unique in that it emphasizes the importance of collaboration among agencies, and members of our advisory committee have made a long-term commitment to share leadership, pool resources and accept responsibility for sustaining this project. Our project consists of three primary program components: (1) Hospital Visitation Services and Initial Screening of all willing parents who will or have given birth in Grand Forks and Nelson counties in North Dakota, which includes an in-depth assessment of the need for our program services. Those that come in contact with expectant parents or new parents provide in-kind social workers or nurses to conduct initial screenings to identify at-risk parents, and our family assessment workers follow up with a voluntary in-depth assessment of participating parents. (2) Less-Intensive Services to New Parents involve volunteer parent mentors who provide home visits and phone calls every two weeks for up to six months to those families less challenged. Parent mentors provide newborn packets and other information, answer questions, link families to community resources and model healthy parenting skills. (3) Intensive Services to High-Risk Parents involve a full family assessment, identification of family goals and weekly home visits that include education and support services designed to foster positive healthy parenting, reduce the risk of child abuse or neglect, ensure preventive health care and up-to-date immunizations, increase the use of support systems and promote positive parent-child relationships.

History:
In the Grand Forks, North Dakota region, community conversation in the past few years has centered on imagining what we can do throughout our region to create a promising future for ourselves and our children. In the spirit of collaboration and visioning, leaders from 16 private and public organizations came together in 1998 to develop a plan to help nurture and strengthen families and, ultimately, prevent child abuse and neglect from occurring. After researching several national models of child abuse and neglect prevention, the committee chose the Healthy Families America (HFA) model for this project because of the documented success it has had in other states throughout the country, as well as the technical assistance available to implement the project. These 16 leaders then named themselves the Healthy Families Region IV Advisory Committee. Lutheran Social Services of North Dakota is acting as the fiscal agent.

Contact person: Barbara Kramer, Program Director, (701) 746-2064, (email)
Office fax number: 701-77-5001

Address:

412 Demers Ave. Grand Forks, ND 58201 (See a map)

Web Site: http://www.lssnd.org

Directions:

Downtown Grand Forks.   Nearest Bus Stop: 1 block, 3 minutes minute walk