Workforce Development

One of the premises of Project LAUNCH and a public health approach is that professionals from a wide range of disciplines come into contact with young children and families every day, and they all can play a role in promoting health. Pediatricians, child care providers, teachers, nurses, home visitors, and others may need additional training to be best equipped to promote healthy development, including social and emotional development; to support parents in raising their children; and to identify potential developmental problems and make appropriate referrals. These are areas of knowledge and skill that are not always included in college degree programs, even at the graduate school level.

Project LAUNCH workforce development is intended to create a shared understanding of how best to support the well-being of young children and families. Every grantee provides various training opportunities to support trainings both within and across these service sectors and disciplines. For example, staff from home visiting, preschool programs, child care, and pediatrician practices might all be trained together in how to screen young children’s social-emotional development, identify children at risk, discuss findings with parents, and make appropriate referrals. Other common areas of focus include understanding the effects of trauma, parental depression, family violence, separation, and substance abuse on children and families.

Project LAUNCH workforce development efforts focus on building capacity within the existing early childhood workforce, expanding the use of evidence-based practices, improving quality of service, building cross-sector partnerships, and working with colleges and universities to create new certification programs (e.g., in early childhood mental health consultation or early childhood mental health).

• The Cherokee Home Visiting Consortium consists of home visitors from various agencies that serve Cherokee, Adair, Sequoyah, and Wagoner Counties in Oklahoma. It is currently facilitated by Cherokee Nation HERO Project, recipient of the Project LAUNCH grant. The consortium provides home visitors with the opportunity to collaborate with other local home visiting agencies as well as to receive workforce development training. Most recently, 12 home visitors were trained in Stepping Stones Triple P, an evidence-based parenting curriculum for parents of children with disabilities.
• Project LAUNCH in Vermont is conducting 10 training sessions for partner organizations and the community at large on cultural competence. In addition, two trainings on using interpreters are being held for service providers serving new Americans in Chittenden County, which is the most populous county in the state.
• Multnomah County, Oregon Project LAUNCH hosted a Young Child Wellness Summit during the first year of the grant in order to provide cross-sector workforce development and to build community connections. The 1-day summit drew 218 participants from a variety of sectors. The agenda featured a keynote on A Public Health Approach to Children's Mental Health, and the opportunity to hear from a new State Representative who had been a longtime early childhood advocate. The workshops were all tied to LAUNCH strategies and community strands. This Summit laid the groundwork for workforce development during the rest of the grant.
• Alabama Project LAUNCH hosted an Early Brain Development and Social/Emotional Health Summit, that included national experts as well as local and state stakeholders. The conference focused on the elationship between early brain development and trauma and its implications for both primary care and early childhood providers.
• In the summer of 2013 the El Paso, Texas Project LAUNCH grantee held its first Growing Great Kids conference. The event focused on promoting child and provider resiliency and self-care. Over 100 providers participated across the three-day event from a diverse audience of professionals in the field of social work, health and human services, nursing and primary care, child care, education, and mental health. Since 2010, New York City Project LAUNCH has delivered Incredible Years® Teacher Training to three ECE sites in the city. Through this program, teachers and teaching assistants have learned to manage classrooms using proactive intervention strategies.
• Boone County Project LAUNCH has provided more than 4,300 physicians, nurses, psychologists, and child care providers with training, coaching, and referral support on the Ages & Stages Questionnaires® (ASQ-3 and ASQ:SE-2).
• Project LAUNCH Illinois provided intensive training on developmentally appropriate primary care that includes mental health topics, trauma, and children’s exposure to violence. Providers attending these trainings represented a wide range of agencies and organizations located throughout the community, including health care, child care, mental health, faith-based, social and community services, arts, home visiting, and advocacy and education. In addition, Project LAUNCH supported the Trauma Recovery and Empowerment Model (TREM), a gender-based trauma model designed to address issues of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse in the lives of women who have been economically and socially marginalized and for whom traditional recovery work has been unavailable or ineffective.