The Center for Coordinating Oregon Home Visiting Systems: Lessons & Progress in Systems Change
Tuesday, August 12, 2025
1:15 PM - 2:00 PM
The effectiveness of early childhood home visiting programs in supporting positive outcomes and preventing child maltreatment are well-documented. Yet because programs have different requirements, funding streams, and approaches, they often operate in silos, reducing their potential to most effectively engage families and to ensure families are provided with the “best fit” program to meet their needs. To address this problem, Oregon launched the Center for Coordinating Oregon Home Visiting Systems (CCOHVS) in 2024 – a program-neutral backbone organization charged with supporting state and regional systems transformation. The CCOHVS facilitates systems change through strategic partnerships in five areas: (1) Building coordinated and family-driven leadership for home visiting systems; (2) Supporting more centralized, coordinated intake and referral systems; (3) Aligning and increasing funding and resources; (4) Building and strengthening the workforce; and (5) Building community awareness and support for early childhood home visiting. This session will share insights how to effectively build and support cross-sector collaborative groups to advance these strategies for home visiting systems change and to evaluate progress towards the state’s vision of an equitable and universally-available system of effective home visiting services. We will share highlights from our recent report, Oregon’s Early Childhood Home Visiting Landscape: Insights, Opportunities, and Recommendations for Action, which describes how communities are innovating to build early childhood home visiting systems. We will engage participants in discussion of our Home Visiting System Theory of Action and share lessons learned from our first year of work to build relationships between child welfare, early childhood, parenting education, self-sufficiency and public health partners at the state and local levels.