Supporting Home Visitors in Evidence-Based Programs: Experience of EBHV Grantees. Supporting Evidence-Based Home Visiting to Prevent Child Maltreatment Brief #4

This brief summarizes experiences supporting and supervising home visitors working in evidence-based programs affiliated with grantees participating in the Children’s Bureau’s Supporting Evidence-Based Home Visiting (EBHV) to Prevent Child Maltreatment initiative. As part of the EBHV cross-site evaluation, Mathematica Policy Research collected the data in spring 2010 during a series of telephone interviews conducted with managers of agencies from 9 of the 17 grantees that were implementing home visiting. These “implementing agencies” were selected to participate in the interviews because they had recruited, hired, and trained new home visitors during the preceding year (in contrast to some agencies that were already operating programs when the grant began, or had not yet reached the stage of staffing their home visiting programs). Most implementing agencies had previous experience with home visiting but few had implemented an evidence-based program. The brief provides an overview of agencies’ strategies for supervising and supporting home visitors, as well as the challenges they faced and lessons learned.