Local and National Policies

Cost Effectiveness

Investment In The Early Years – on the cost effectiveness of quality child care and quality home visiting (MI-AIMH)

Legislative Issues

TANF Versus School Success – on making TANF better for working mothers (Tableman)

Outreach Partnerships, Office of Outreach & Engagement, Michigan State University

http://www.outreach.msu.edu/bpbriefs/archive.asp

BEST PRACTICE BRIEFS are short publications providing usable information on human services concepts, processes, models and tools for funders, decision makers, planners, and managers. Of special interest here are:

#10 A Community System of Care for Very Young Children: Focuses on systems aspects of programming — the universe of children whom various services are developed, the characteristics of children ready to succeed in kindergarten, a systems planning process, and a community example.
#16 Evaluating Comunity-based programs: Home Visiting as an Example: Explores why evaluation cited in the Packard Foundation’s 1999 issue of The Future of Children were inconclusive.
# 17 Effective Home Visiting for Very Young Children -1: Covers outcomes found in various randomized assignment evaluation studies and the variations in home visiting models.
#18 Summaries of Home Visiting Models for Very Young Children: Covers a range of widely distributed or evaluated home visiting models.
# 19 Effective Home Visiting for Very Young Children -2: Covers the various approaches to intervention, characteristics of parents that affect outcomes, characteristics of the environment, the relationship, and the content of effective home visiting.
# 20 Effective Home Visiting for Very Young Children -3: Covers staffing – professional vs. paraprofessional, recruitment criteria, training and supervision, and logistics – when to enroll, how often to visit.

ZERO TO THREE Policy Center

http://www.zerotothree.org/policy/

The Policy Center is a research-based, non-partisan program that:

“translates scientific research into language that is more accessible and tools that policymakers can use to inform more effective policies,
partners with states and communities to build effective early childhood systems,
cultivates leadership in states and communities, and
studies and shares promising state and community strategies “

Policy center publications are organized into the following catesgories: Infant and Toddler Policy Agenda, Early Head Start, Child Care, Early Intervention, Welfare, Child Welfare, Infant Mental Health, Higher Education, and Building a 0-5 System.

Publications include:

Improving Maternal and Infant Mental Health: Focus on Maternal Depression , a joint policy brief of ZERO TO THREE and the National Center for Infant and Early Childhood Health Policy at UCLA.
Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health: Promoting Healthly Social and Emotional Development , a ZERO TO THREE fact sheet

IMH Professionals and advocates may wish to subscribe to the ZERO TO THREE Policy Network E-Newsletter, The Baby Monitor. Important publications recently highlighted by the Baby Monitor include:

Early Childhood Interventions: Proven Results, Future Promise , the RAND Corporation, January 2006: addresses the potential consequences of not investing additional resources in the lives of children.

Michigan’s Great Start For Kids

http://www.greatstartforkids.org

Go to this site to learn more about Michigan’s commitiment to education beginning at birth, not when a child enters school, and the Great Start Collaborative and Capacity Building grants recently announced by Governor Granholm.

(Links to other organizations concerned with infants, toddlers and young children are provided as a service and do not reflect MI-AIMH support for policy positions taken by those organizations)

Early Childhood Investment Corporation (ECIC)

http://www.ecic4kids.org/

The Early Childhood Investment Corporation (ECIC) was created in August of 2005 to ensure that every young child in Michigan has a Great Start and arrives at the kindergarten door healthy and ready to succeed in school, with parents who are committed to educational achievement.

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