Supporting Home Visitors with the Tools and Resources They Need to Succeed
By Lisa James
Vice President, Health
April 23, 2026
Parenting is hard – and new parents are faced with so many questions and challenges about how best to care for their babies. Some parents often turn to friends, neighbors, and family for help. But many parents, especially those experiencing violence, might not have the support they need in a baby’s first years of life.
That’s where home visitors can help. Home visitors are a trusted, relationship-based workforce of trained professionals who partner with expectant parents and families with young children in their homes, including families that are more likely to face barriers to health care or have limited access to supports. These are voluntary free services that help parents foster healthy child development, support parenting skills, learn what to expect as they grow, and identify any health concerns. They also support the overall well-being of the family and can link them to available resources, including support for families experiencing violence.
Support for Home Visitors
This week is National Home Visiting Week, and we celebrate home visitors who support families across the United States, from those in the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Visiting funded programs delivering nearly a million home visits each year to the broader home visiting field supporting families in communities nationwide.
Last week, the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), in partnership with its Institute for Home Visiting Workforce Development, launched the first-ever National Strategy for the Home Visiting Workforce to strengthen this vital workforce by creating career pathways, improving working conditions and compensation, and supporting workforce well-being—positioning home visitors for even greater reach and impact.
This national momentum reinforces the importance of investing in home visitors as a critical part of the maternal and child health workforce.
For FUTURES, supporting home visitors means:
- recruiting more of them, especially in rural areas with limited health care access,
- offering them fair pay and professional development opportunities,
- providing them with the tools and training to promote relational health, including addressing trauma and adversity, and
- promoting their wellness.
What FUTURES is Doing
Home visitors are central to us as we expand our Rural Maternal and Infant Health Initiative, which will equip trusted providers–including home visitors, doulas, pediatricians, community health workers, and advocates–with tools to address intimate partner violence and support caregiver-child relationships and connection.
But supporting home visitors is not new. For over 10 years, we have partnered with home visitors in nearly every state and:
- produced Healthy Moms Happy Babies, a curriculum and resource for home visitors on trauma-informed domestic violence programming and practice transformation,
- created Connected Parents, Connected Kids, an evidence-based intervention with strategies for home visitors and other health professionals to engage parents and caregivers in conversations about safety, parenting, and resilience-building strategies,
- partnered with Education Development Center, which leads the HRSA-funded Home Visiting Collaborative Improvement and Innovation Network (HV CoIIN), a national quality improvement movement, to help home visitors address intimate partner violence and childhood adversity, and
- are working with the Perigee Foundation to expand and scale what we are doing to build upon two decades of work with fathers to support multigenerational strategies for non-violent caregivers and strengthen the parent-child bond.
Our vision is to make this prevention work part of the standards of care for home visitors and all health professionals in early childhood systems.
Our Impact
Since we started, our work has demonstrated meaningful impact.
- Connected Parents, Connected Kids has been implemented across home visiting programs in seven states, resulting in IPV-related support (from 6% to 96% ), and home visitors report greater confidence and stronger rapport with families.
- the work is based on an intervention associated with a 60% increase in survivors ending unsafe relationships and a threefold increase in youth disclosures of abuse, as well as self-reported improvements in physical and mental health.
The work that home visitors do is hard. They are on the front lines every day, working with parents, some of whom are experiencing violence and adversity. By investing in their training, support, and well-being, we can strengthen their ability to improve family health and safety outcomes.
Every child deserves to grow up in a home filled with love, patience, and possibility, and home visitors are an integral part of advancing prevention-focused approaches that foster healthy relationships and intergenerational well-being.
