Two Tribal Visionaries Lead Transformative Home Visiting Collaboration Efforts

In 2019, Terri Rattler, Tiospa Unyunsutapte Hehan Wasaguyusapte Tribal Home Visiting Program Manager of the Great Plains Tribal Leaders Health Board, was new in her position and was looking for targeted resources to support her team and participating home visiting families. She wanted to create opportunities for home visiting partners to learn about one another and cultivate an environment where home visiting is a part of a continuum of support for young families. Terri needed to understand how other home visiting programs operated, how they reached their goals, and how they helped families in the Lake Traverse Reservation in the Sisseton Wahpeton community.

The Tiospa Unyunsutapte Hehan Wasaguyusapte Home Visiting Program (translates to “Strengthening and Encouraging Families” [SEF])  implements the Family Spirit    Visit disclaimer page model and aims to support and engage parents, caregivers, and community members to empower family resilience by strengthening Dakota culture and kinship and other protective factors for lifelong health and wellness. The program purposefully and thoughtfully supplements the model with the Tiwahe (translates to “Family”) curriculum for ages 3 to 5 and an adapted and translated (Lakota and Dakota) version of the Mothers and Babies postpartum depression intervention    Visit disclaimer page. SEF is implemented under a grant from the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) Tribal Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program.

In Terri’s search, she met April Eastman, Project Director for the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate’s Indigenous-LAUNCH    Visit disclaimer page[1] (I-LAUNCH) program, and a strong partnership began. SAMHSA-funded I-LAUNCH also provides Family Spirit home visiting services on the Lake Traverse Reservation, and the two leaders quickly recognized the benefits of collaboration between their programs. They shared resources to co-create digital stories describing their programs, participated in Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation services twice per week, and were co-trained in family well-being and child development screeners. The teams learned from and supported one another through the implementation of virtual home visiting services and maintaining personal well-being during the height of the pandemic.

SEF established partnerships with the Early Childhood Intervention Program (ECIP), Enemy Swim Family and Child Education (FACE) Program, Bright Start, the state MIECHV program, and the First 1000 Days Interagency Forum  Visit disclaimer page. As a group, the First 1000 Days Interagency Forum strives to achieve the best possible health outcomes throughout life by coordinating resources to support families on the Lake Traverse Reservation community, facilitating communication about community services and events that benefit community families, promoting and supporting collaboration and communication between agencies for the benefit of families.

Terri and April built upon these already strong relationships to form the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate Home Visiting Collaborative (HVC). It was evident that Terri and April were destined to connect to achieve a shared vision for convening a home visiting collaborative. Simplicity was important, along with a comfortable environment “where you can easily talk things out and have an avenue to understand more about home visiting; we wanted to create something comfortable/nothing heavy and did not want to step on each other’s feet,” Terri said. Respecting and honoring each other are important foundations. This model of simplicity and deep respect makes the HVC so successful.

As Terri and April began their journey to bring together a dedicated group of fellow home visiting visionaries, they took this thoughtful approach to create an initiative that would strengthen their tribal community further. The purpose of the HVC is to provide support and guidance and strengthen the communication of early childhood programs to improve family wellness.

The HVC began meeting in December 2019. Initially, the group met every other month, but now, because of its success, it meets monthly to avoid losing its current momentum. Participants quickly formulated initial goals of:

1. strengthening the referral and creating a “warm hand-off” process, 
2. assessing possible duplication of services, 
3. identifying opportunities for collaboration, 
4. creating and exchanging resources, and
5. considering opportunities for shared data collection around typical home visiting screening tools.

The first collaboration partners included I-LAUNCH, the Enemy Swim FACE program, Bright Start, Great Plains Healthy Start, the ECIP, and SEF. The HVC has since grown to include 11 thought partners.

Terri and April purposefully include home visitors from these organizations as HVC attendees. Home visitors benefit considerably from this collaboration. Meetings are an opportunity to strengthen their shared home visiting knowledge, network, and build relationships with other home visitors; their collective voice provides invaluable guidance.

Although the approach of the HVC is simplicity, it incorporates strategies of successful collaborative groups. The HVC has a clear vision, co-constructs knowledge about community and family needs, engages in action planning to achieve specific community changes, has strong leadership, and provides documentation and feedback on the changes; in short, it makes outcomes matter. Engaging the community and building strong partnerships helps strengthen and sustain home visiting programs.

Creating and sustaining a collaborative requires patience, consistency, perseverance, and an understanding of how collaborative members will best work together. Terri and April understood that and created an effective model for their tribal community. “We hope the home visitors and other collaborative participants can experience our type of collaboration, and then maybe others in our community want to collaborate more; collaboration strengthens all of us,” Terri says.

[1] Project I-LAUNCH (Indigenous-Linking Actions for Unmet Needs in Children’s Health) is a federally funded program that supports the coordination of systems, the building of infrastructure, and the strengthening of capacities of adult caregivers all to support the social, emotional, cognitive, physical, and behavioral development of children from birth to age 7.

For more information about the program, contact the SEF program manager, Terri Rattler, at terri.rattler@gptchb.org.

The  ACF MIECHV program awards grants to tribal entities to develop, implement, and evaluate home visiting programs in American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) communities. The grants help build and strengthen tribal capacity to support and promote the health and well-being of AIAN families, expand the evidence base around home visiting in tribal communities, and support and strengthen cooperation and linkages between programs that serve tribal children and their families. Find out more about the Tribal Home Visiting program and grantees.