Introduction
Early childhood home visiting is a service delivery strategy that supports a range of positive outcomes, including improvements in child and maternal health, child development and school readiness, family economic self-sufficiency, and a reduction in child abuse and neglect. Evidence-based home visiting programs reached about 281,000 families in 2023, according to the National Home Visiting Resource Center, but many more families are eligible and could benefit from these programs. Engaging families in services, including during initial outreach and recruitment and for ongoing retention, is a long-standing challenge for many home visiting programs. The goal of the Family Engagement Toolkit is to help home visiting programs strengthen their engagement with families through practical resources.
The Family Engagement Toolkit is one component of the Understanding and Expanding the Reach of Home Visitingâ¯(HV-REACH) project . The HV-REACH project is developing and disseminating evidence-informed resources and strategies that home visiting programs can use to increase access to and participation in home visiting services among eligible families. Mathematica is conducting this project in partnership with the Brazelton Touchpoints Center and Social Grove on behalf of the Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation in the Administration for Children and Families, in collaboration with the Health Resources and Services Administration.
Purpose
The Family Engagement Toolkit is a guide and a set of resources to help early childhood home visiting programs strengthen their outreach, recruitment, and retention efforts. It translates knowledge about how to engage families into practical steps. In doing so, the toolkit can help home visiting programs:
Assess their strengths and weaknesses in building awareness, enrolling, and retaining families
Think about—and prioritize—their immediate needs and long-term goals
Strategize and make changes that respond to families’ or communities’ needs
Learn about common family engagement challenges or strategies
Key Findings and Highlights
The Family Engagement Toolkit contains resources to help program directors or leaders work with their teams to achieve the following goals:
Identify their family engagement challenges through self-assessments and prioritize a challenge to focus on first.
Develop and implement an action plan to address the prioritized challenge.
Track and assess the results of the action plan.
The toolkit links to many publicly available resources, including other tools and toolkits. Each resource is summarized in the resource catalog . Readers can review the catalog to find one that might be helpful to them, or search for resources on a particular topic.
Because there is no single answer for how to improve family engagement, the Family Engagement Toolkit is meant to be a springboard for program leaders working with staff or partners to address the engagement challenges—and opportunities—their program is facing. The toolkit resources are flexible. Leaders can decide how much of the toolkit to use at any given time based on their needs and availability; their capacity for program improvement; and budget, funder, or home visiting model requirements.
Methods
The ideas in this toolkit are based on input from several sources:
Representatives of home visiting programs; state Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting awardees; technical assistance providers; and researchers—including some from these groups who reviewed the toolkit as part of a user testing group
Home visiting literature (including the HV-REACH literature synthesis)
Technical assistance materials
Publicly available resources
Citation
Kleinman, Rebecca, Annie Buonaspina, Emily Rosen, Jessica F. Harding, Catherine Ayoub, Christina Mondi-Rago, and John Hornstein. “The Family Engagement Toolkit: Guidance for Early Childhood Home Visiting Programs on Improving Outreach, Recruitment, and Retention.” OPRE Report #2025-139. Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2025.
Files
- PDF OPRE Family Engagement Toolkit: Action Plan (680.33 KB)
- PDF OPRE Family Engagement Toolkit: Resource Catalog (585.84 KB)
- PDF OPRE Family Engagement Toolkit: Self Assessment (471.94 KB)