Facilitating Comprehensive Services and Supports in Family Child Care Project (CSS)

Summary

The goal of this project was to better understand how families and children in family child care programs find out about and use supports and resources including those that address their health, mental health, financial stability, and social-emotional well-being. The project also aimed to examine the role of family child care networks in facilitating access to resources as well as to highlight the role that family child care educators play in helping families and children thrive.

This project is funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. We gratefully acknowledge the work of the community advisory boards at our four sites as well as our community family child care network and support organization partners.

Products

Unpacking Comprehensive Services and Supports in Family Child Care: The Role of Networks

This brief presents an analysis of national data exploring how HBCC networks support the delivery of comprehensive services and supports to children and families in HBCC settings, as well as recommendations for HBCC networks and cross-sector policy changes. We find that:

1. Networks primarily offer CSS focused on children’s health and development, with fewer services focused on family well-being.
2. Many networks offer information about CSS, but fewer offer direct services or assistance.
3. Networks use data collection, staffing, and relationship-building strategies to implement CSS for children and families.
4. Networks that do not prioritize family support and engagement as part of their mission may face additional barriers to CSS delivery.

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Unpacking Comprehensive Services & Supports in Family Child Care: A Participatory Approach to Understanding Educator & Network Capacity

This brief reports on findings from a participatory research project with networks, educators, and parents focused on CSS in FCC settings. We share cross-site highlights from the study, followed by short stories of this process from three of the four network communities. We then conclude with additional action steps and recommendations that networks may find helpful in their own work to increase access to CSS for families and children through FCC programs.

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Facilitating Comprehensive Services in Family Child Care: Tool Kit for Home Based Child Care (HBCC) Networks

This tool kit is intended to help home-based child care (HBCC) networks plan, develop, and execute a Community Advisory Board (CAB), an approach informed by community-based participatory research methodology. The tool kit is divided into two parts: “CABs for Social Change in the HBCC Sector — Why a CAB?” which gives some general background information on CABs with HBCC-targeted examples to get you started; and “Understanding Comprehensive Services in HBCC Network Communities,” which includes specific protocol examples from the CSS project.

Download the tool kit