Building a statewide home visiting program from 2 to 42 sites: a state agency's perspective.

In 1995, based on emerging research across the US and a tragic case in Connecticut (Gomby, Larson, Lewit, & Behrman, 993; Kauffman, 1996; Tuohy, 1992; Office of the Child Advocate, 2001) that highlighted the need to prevent child abuse, the onnecticut Children’s Trust Fund, now a division of the State’s Department of Social Services, launched amajor initiative to evelop a universal home visiting program throughout the state. Through the home visiting program the Trust Fund sought o identify at-risk parents and provide themwith effective services. The goal of these services was to address the risk factors hat made parents vulnerable to child abuse and neglect and, ultimately, to reduce the number of children substantiated by he child welfare system as abused or neglected. Although much has been written about home visiting programs (Donelan-McCall, Eckenrode, & Olds, 2009; Howard & rooks-Gunn, 2009; Leventhal, 2005;MacMillan et al., 2009), little has beenwritten about the perspectives of state agencies hat fund and direct such programs. The purpose of this commentary, therefore, is to describe the Trust Fund’s strategy to evelop the statewide program and describe how it was expanded from 2 to 42 sites. Chief among these strategies were fforts to gain the support of the state legislature, to develop a partnership with academic centers that would conduct