Healthy Families Massachusetts (HFM) provides strengths-based, family-centered, intensive home visiting services for all first-time parents ages 20 and under across Massachusetts.

HFM home visits engage the whole family, including fathers, mothers, babies and extended family. HFM home visitors are trained paraprofessionals under the supervision of professionals.

Participants can enroll during pregnancy or any time prior to the child's first birthday. They can continue to receive services until their child turns three. The program is offered locally and tailored to be culturally relevant to each community's participants.

HFM has the broadest reach of all universal home visiting programs, providing universally accessible services statewide.

The HFM Difference

• Parents can enroll over an extended period and without a risk screening. The program recognizes that risk can change over time, and that parents can decide when they need and want support.
• Universal Access - eligibility for HFM services is any first time parent, age 20 or younger, regardless of income or other risk criteria.
• Fatherhood component - while the program is open to parents of either gender, HFM has focused resources and services to meeting the needs and interests of young fathers, whether they are parenting as part of a couple or attempting to co-parent.
• Group based activities - HFM has a strong emphasis on providing group based activities to reduce isolation, promote peer to peer support, and encourage development of informal support networks.
• Outreach - HFM conducts extensive outreach to enhance the many facets of the program: to recruit and retain participant families, to identify and engage referral sources, to collaborate with other service provider organizations, and to inform and respond to all interested stakeholders.
• HFM focuses on retaining families over time, but also recognizes that family retention is related to staff retention.
• extensive staff training component
• formal mechanism - The Healthy Families Massachusetts Network for all staff (home visitors and supervisors/coordinators) to develop peer to peer networks across programs to share strategies, resources and promising practices, reduce isolation and provide feedback on program implementation.
• participation in Think Tanks, in order to review new policies and provide feedback on implementation.
• development of a careers ladders/lattices agenda for HFM staff considering career tracks.

HFM's Challenges

• Developing and maintaining program fidelity
• The HFM model of providing strengths-based, family centered, intensive home visiting services has challenged provider agencies that are accustomed to working with parents from a deficit perspective.
• Programs have been more accustomed to working in a case/crisis management mode of providing therapeutic services and /or referrals to services without intensive follow-up.
• The mode of HFM services is to interact with families in a skills-building framework, completing tasks with participants, not for them. Service providers (home visitors) encourage participants to develop, at their own pace, the information, skills, and support networks to be strong parents and to be the best advocates for themselves and their children upon graduation from the program.
• Developing a fatherhood component
• Traditionally, services are provided to support mothers and babies. Service providers are challenged by a broad range of barriers to providing services to fathers, from lack of information about the importance of father involvement to a lack of skills or knowledge base with which to provide services, to resistance to working with men. This has been an ongoing struggle and continues to be a focus of technical assistance, training, and program development.

HFM's Collaborative Efforts

• HFM staff work collaboratively to link families to and provide complementary services with other programs supporting families, such as Early Intervention, Head Start/Early Head Start, WIC, TANF, Medicaid, Food Stamps, Structured Living, Parent Child Home Program, MA Family Networks, and MA Family Centers.
• More importantly, the governance of the Massachusetts Children's Trust Fund lends itself to interagency collaboration. The commissioners of all state agencies that provide services for families and children (for example, the Departments of Education and Public Health) have seats on the CTF Board of Directors and thus have close contact with HFM goals, activities, issues, and progress.