Early Childhood Developmental Health Systems: Evidence to Impact Center

Young children and their families can benefit from a range of programs and services designed to support the healthy development of babies and toddlers, yet in communities across the country, families often face substantial barriers to accessing the care they need. Comprehensive early childhood developmental health systems (ECDHS) bring together these varied fields—maternal and child health, early care and education, child welfare, social supports, and more—to ensure families and children receive the services they need, when they need them.

The ECDHS: Evidence to Impact Center (Center) supports states and communities in building early childhood systems to improve the health and well-being of young children and their families. The Center provides funding, technical assistance, resources, and evidence to advance systems-building efforts. As a subcontractor to ZERO TO THREE, JBA supports the center by—

• Developing a comprehensive strategy resource for early childhood system leaders that offers practical strategies and field-based examples across four priority areas for addressing identified gaps and that links users to Center-led resources.
• Contributing to the ECDHS learning agenda, tracking progress of Center activities, and supporting dissemination of key findings.
• Reviewing published and grey literature and conducting targeted web searches to develop six systems change strategy resources aligned with core conditions of systems change, such as policies, practices, and resource flows.
• Supporting alignment and coordination among the Center, partner organizations, and technical assistance recipients through consultation, subject matter expertise, meeting participation, and monthly program progress reports.
• Leading an evaluation of three Implementation Sites—Colorado, Maui County, and Washington—to document systems-building progress. The team is producing four evaluation briefs, including individual briefs for each site and a cross-site brief synthesizing common strategies, key partnerships, and shared facilitators and challenges encountered, to lift up lessons learned and implications for the broader early childhood field.