U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: Early Comprehensive Childhood Systems Impact

The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), Maternal and Child Health Bureau (MCHB) is accepting applications for the Early Comprehensive Childhood Systems Impact (ECCS Impact) program. The purpose of this program is to enhance early childhood (EC) systems building and demonstrate improved outcomes in population-based children’s developmental health and family well-being indicators using a Collaborative Innovation and Improvement Network (CoIIN) approach. An additional goal of the ECCS Impact grants is the development of collective impact expertise, implementation and sustainability of efforts at the state, county and community levels.

Recipients of the ECCS Impact program will identify 1-5 place-based communities within their state/territory to participate in the Early Childhood Comprehensive Systems Collaborative Innovation and Improvement Network (ECCS CoIIN). At least one of the identified communities should be a community receiving state and/or tribal Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) services.

The overall aim of the ECCS Impact and the ECCS CoIIN is that within 60 months, participating communities will show a 25 percent increase from baseline in age appropriate developmental skills among their communities’ three (3) year old children. The secondary aims are to:

• Strengthen leadership and expertise in continuous quality improvement and support innovation among a cohort of recipients representing states/territories and their identified place-based communities.
• Achieve greater collective impact in early childhood systems at the state, county, and community level with common aims, shared metrics and measurement systems, coordinated strategies, continuous communication, and a backbone organization at the state, county, and community levels.
• Develop primarily two-generation approaches to drive integration of early childhood services vertically (i.e., within a sector such as health care) and horizontally (i.e., across sectors such as between early care and education and health care).
• Develop and adopt core sets of indicators to measure EC system processes and outcome indicators to measure population impact around children’s developmental health and family well-being.
• Test innovative EC systems change ideas, develop spread strategies, and adopt new EC policies for sustaining the systems developed during this project that improve children’s developmental health and family well-being.

Amount: $6,400,000 is available for up to 15 grants with a maximum award of $426,000 each.

Eligibility: Any public or private entity, including an Indian tribe or tribal organization and faith-based and community-based organizations.

Link: http://www.hrsa.gov/grants/index.html

Note: A Technical Assistance Webinar on the ECCS Impact FOA will be held on February 23, 2016 from 1:30 pm – 3:00 pm MST. Log into https://hrsa.connectsolutions.com/eccs-ifta/ to view and use the following phone number and passcode: toll free call-in: 877-951-7311; passcode: 3988192.

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