Addressing Early Childhood Health Equity in Communities and States
Across the United States, local communities and regions have recognized the urgent need to support the health and developmental well-being of young children and their families by coordinating activities aimed at improving children’s health and well-being.
Early Childhood Health Equity (ECHE) work seeks to strengthen early childhood systems to support healthy child development and reduce health inequities and disparities that can have a lifelong impact. The briefs below synthesize the recent work of the ECHE Landscape Project and highlight the themes and findings that emerged across the project activities. Key themes we also gathered through the ECHE Landscape survey, including cross-sector relationships, operationalization of health equity, adaptation of initiatives to the COVID-19 pandemic, data and measurement, sustainability, and connections between local and state ECHE initiatives.
Descriptions of each brief can be found below.
See the following case stories for specific examples of programmatic strategies:
- Parents Know Best: How Family-Led Data Collection and Advocacy Lead to Increases in Early Childhood Funding in Alameda County
- Circle of Respect: Baltimore’s B’More for Healthy Babies Healthy Family America (FHA) Home Visiting Program Prioritizes Collaboration to Empower New Mothers
- Build a Strong Foundation: How Child Welfare Agencies in Alaska’s Matanuska-Susitna Borough (Mat-Su) Improved Family Contact and Set the Stage for Future Family Engagement
Each brief is a joint publication of Child Trends and the National Institute for Children’s Health Quality (NICHQ). Support for this report was provided by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation.
Details
Embedding Equity in Early Childhood Initiatives
This brief presents lessons about how initiatives that are founded on doing work equitably are handling multiple adversities (e.g., racism, the COVID-19 pandemic, and decreased funding) in cross-sector early childhood health equity initiatives, derived from interviews with eight community or state initiatives.
Cross-sector Support for Health Equity in Early Childhood During the COVID-19 Pandemic
This brief presents lessons learned from cross-sector early childhood health equity initiatives in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and continued systematic racism. Information was derived from interviews with six community initiative representatives.
Sustaining Cross-sector Early Childhood Health Equity Initiatives
This brief presents lessons about the sustainability of cross-sector early childhood health equity initiatives, drawn from interviews with five community or state initiative representatives.
State-Local Collaboration and Support for Early Childhood Health Equity Initiatives
This brief highlights takeaways from the four conversations, including supports for state-local collaborations and impact on ECHE initiative work, provides suggestions for strengthening state-local collaborations and recommends further reading on early childhood state-local collaborations.
Use of Data and Management in Cross-sector Early Childhood Health Equity Initiatives
This brief presents lessons about the use of data and measurement in cross-sector early childhood health equity initiatives, derived from interviews with five community or state initiative representatives and six representatives from multi-site networks that support local efforts.
