Where Most Needed

Reporter Gautam Naik of the Wall Street Journal profiles a program called Every Child Succeeds that the story claims is based on a "tough corporate model" of quantifiable results—courtesy of support from headquarters personnel and dollars from Proctor & Gamble.  The program is administered by the United Way of Greater Cincinnati (EIN 31-0537502 Form 990) and Children's Hospital Medical Center (EIN 31-0833936 Form 990). 

The full article has been liberated by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for those without a WSJ subscription. 

While the article has an upbeat tone, it includes this cautionary (and a little peculiar) note:

Because Every Child has been running only since 1999, it's too early to tell whether it can be administered on a larger scale or whether mothers will revert to old habits once home visits stop. At an annual cost of about $2,500 per family, more than that of other similar programs, Every Child presents policymakers with a difficult choice. Every Child itself says it has funds to reach only a fifth of needy women each year in the Cincinnati area.

"Only" since 1999 is "too early to tell?"  Now I'm intrigued. 

Later in the piece, we learn that the home visitation program was adapted from a "home visitor program proven elsewhere for more than a decade."  A lttle digging (here and here) turns up that the program uses the Nurse-Family Partnership model developed by David Ord, Ph.D. and Healthy Families America, a program of Prevent Child Abuse America (EIN 23-7235671 Form 990). 

The Nurse-Family Partnership, it turns out, is a very specific model of home visitation that has been researched by Dr. Ord for close to twenty years with on-site studies that quantified results in Elmira, New York, Memphis, Tennesee, and Denver, Colorado. 

So, despite what the WSJ says, the issue with this program is no longer quantifying the results.  Instead, Dr. Ord's work has turned to how the program can be scaled up ("Taking Preventive Intervention to Scale: The Nurse-Family Partnership.")  Even though Dr. Ord's research has shown that the program of visitation to low-income, first-time mothers yields monetary benefits four times its cost (from reduced health care costs and, later on, reduced delinquency—so even the Justice Department is interested in it), the program still struggles for funding. 

The paper describes a few of the means that local groups (government and charities) have sometimes used to cobble together the funds, and also that state legislation or budget measures are promoting state-wide interventions in Colorado, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Wyoming.  Most sites are implementing it through the public health route, while a few a using the hospital & nonprofit approach taken in Cincinnati.

The Wall Street Journal leaves us with the rather gloomy conclusion that the program is trying to raise $1 million and scaling back to operate in a single neighborhood, while "designing a home-visitation model that could be used in other parts of the U.S."  Fortunately, that's not the reality.  Just as we found with homelessness and the "housing first" program, there is a promising solution available and the task is to get it adapted more widely.  Call in the P&G marketing team.