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March 2013Vol. 14, No. 2Family-Centered Home Visits

The National Abandoned Infants Assistance Resource Center (AIA) publishes an ongoing series of blog posts, titled Change Agents, in which they interview each of the direct service programs funded by the Children's Bureau under the AIA Act. One recent post focused on the Family Centered Home Visitation Program (FCHVP) in Philadelphia, PA. AIA interviewed the program's Project Coordinator, Una Majmudar, who talked about the program's objectives, work, clientele, and challenges.

FCHVP offers home visiting services to women living with HIV in Philadelphia who also are pregnant or parenting a child age birth to 3 years. Majmudar discussed the program's commitment to service through trauma-informed practices and shared some of the challenges and advantages experienced by both agencies and individual workers in their efforts to become trauma-informed. For example, agencies must be ready and willing to allocate sufficient time and resources toward staff support, and staff members can often experience secondary trauma. She also talked about the families that FCHVP works with and relates some of her personal experiences in engaging families, such as the struggle to work with clients that might not be ready or open to receiving support, the rewards of observing growth and strength in a parent-child relationship, and the need for creative approaches to overcoming barriers.

To read the entire interview and learn more about FCHVP, visit:

http://aia.berkeley.edu/change-agents-family-centered-home-visitation-program/

Read about other featured direct service programs by accessing the Change Agents blog:

http://aia.berkeley.edu/category/blog/