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Act now and help ensure continued support for families in your communityTell Your Congressional Delegation To Support Reauthorization Of The MIECHV Program
The Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program supports families with millions of home visits that strengthen families and communities across the United States. Without reauthorization, these necessary services will be cut for families in need and programs will be unable to reach more families.
Congress must extend the MIECHV program for five years with incremental funding increases until the program reaches the funding level of $800 million per year to ensure stability for families, effectiveness of programs, and expansion of resources.
With increased support, MIECHV will be able to:
- Expand and improve existing evidence-based home visiting services
- Enhance states’ ability to reach more vulnerable children and families
- Provide stability for families and administrators by assuring continuity of funding for effective programming
- Build infrastructure that benefits not only MIECHV programs but all community resources and program coordination
- Improve implementation and evaluation of evidence-based policy that can be replicated in future public policy programs
- Create further cost savings for communities and government
Background
States have successfully implemented home visiting programs in local communities since the 1980s. Nearly a decade ago, in response to increased demand from communities across the country, President George W. Bush proposed a $10 million federal investment in home visiting in 2008 through a program called ‘Evidence Based Home Visiting’ (EBHV). When President Barack Obama took office, his administration sought to build on President Bush’s investment in evidence-based home visiting programs. In 2010, President Obama signed legislation that authorized the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program. MIECHV was originally funded at $1.5 billion for five years.
In 2014, MIECHV received a one-year authorization under the Medicare Sustainable Growth Rate extension. The next spring, Congress passed the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 which reauthorized funding for MIECHV through September, 2017. Before September 2017, MIECHV must be reauthorized with a long-term extension and expansion of funding.
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