Help Me Grow Vermont's Impact
Investing in Vermont children’s healthy development today is the foundation of our community’s future social and economic wellbeing.
How We Help: Help Me Grow works to ensure that all children reach their greatest potential by:
- Helping families and professionals navigate resources and referrals through a centralized system
- Connecting families with information, resources, and social supports
- Improving parents’ knowledge of their child’s developmental milestones and understanding of social and emotional skill development
Building a Solid Foundation for Young Children
Vision: Build strong, prosperous communities where all Vermont children can develop, learn, and thrive to reach their full potential.
Mission: Align the efforts of early childhood partners to strengthen families and ensure that all children reach their greatest potential.
- Increase family's and service providers' knowledge of early child development, including social and emotional skills, by offering developmental monitoring and screening to increase positive parenting practices and empower families.
- Train providers to conduct developmental monitoring and screening and to use Vermont’s registry to ensure that each child reaches their full potential.
- Ensure communities are fully plugged into a reliable grid of resources –– including elements such as quality early care and learning opportunities, healthy food and supportive relationships to ensure that all children have what they need to thrive.
- Connect families and children to the community resources they need, when they need them, to ensure lifelong, optimal health and developmental outcomes.
- Deliver care coordination for, and follow up with families accessing the contact center to ensure young children get connected to the services they need at an early age when the benefit of those supports is greatest.
Team Members
The Vermont Department of Health (VDH) provides a structural home for Help Me Grow Vermont that is essential for long-term system sustainability. VDH provides managerial and fiscal oversight and coordinates partners into a leadership team that guides the Help Me Grow (HMG) system as it evolves.
United Ways of Vermont partners with HMG to offer the easy-to-access HMG Resource Hub staffed by child development specialists. The partnership enables HMG to use Vermont 2-1-1's extensive database. The HMG Resource Hub is the go-to place for families, health care providers, early educators and other professionals seeking information, support and referrals for expectant parents and families with children through age eight.
Building Bright Futures (BBF) State and Regional Councils play a crucial system role through family and commuity outreach and networking efforts. BBF coordinators organize community events to engage and educate families and assist HMG to maintain a reliable resource grid so families and children from all communities in Vermont can plug in and easily access the resources and services they need to thrive.
The Vermont Child Health Improvement Program (VCHIP) partners with HMG to provide training and system improvement education to support a multidisciplinary system that ensures all young children receive appropriate developmental screening and connection to services. HMG system evaluation and analysis are also provided by VCHIP.
Let's Grow Kids partners with HMG to optimize the health and well-being of young children through access to high quality early learning environments. Let's Grow Kids works with HMG to support quality improvement, development monitoring and screen training, including use of HMG's ASQ online system, for child care providers.
Help Me Grow (HMG) Vermont partners with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to integrate Learn the Signs. Act Early. Program materials into early childhood settings and programs that serve parent of young children, including low-income and diverse populations, across Vermont.
The Vermont Department for Children and Families, Child Development Division, partners with VDH to ensure the HMG system is efficient, integrated and coordinated. HMG supports the CDD mission: To improve the well-being of Vermont's children. We do this through partnerships with families, communities, schools, providers and state and federal agencies that increase access to high-quality, sustainable, child development services.
Vermont’s Agency of Education (AOE) partners with HMG to ensure that all Vermont children have their developmental progression monitored through a coordinated, statewide system. AOE promotes use of HMG's ASQ Online system across universal prekindergarten education programs and public schools so that each and every child is ready to learn and succeed when they enter kindergarten.