Innovation for Family, Friend and Neighbor Care continues

Today in Minnesota is the second of a two day national meeting on Family, Friend and Neighbor (FFN) care. The meeting is put on by the national Build and attendees from various Build states are attending. Ready 4 K is the home of Build in Minnesota. According to the National Build Initiative, the goals of the meeting include:

• Increase dialogue and build momentum among all stakeholders to advance support for Family, Friend and Neighbor (FFN) caregivers.
• Provide a forum for peer-to-peer and expert information and strategy sharing to examine emerging models and the lessons that can be taken from them.
  
• Foster an understanding of how to integrate FFN care into early childhood systems and how to create and advance a policy agenda for FFN care.
• Foster an understanding of how the strengths of FFN care relate to our long-standing conceptions about quality and quality improvement, particularly related to cultural compatibility between a child’s family life and his/her child care life.
• Stimulate thought about next steps to forward our shared agendas in the field.

Minnesota was chosen to host this meeting partly because of the groundbreaking legislation passed in 2007 that made Minnesota the first state to dedicate money to supporting Family, Friend and Neighbor caregivers. Richard Chase from Wilder Research published a case study of Minnesota's success, State Policies for Supporting Family Friend and Neighbor Care.

There's also exciting things happening around the country. Representatives from Washington state and Illinois also share what is happening in their states. In Illinois, great innovation is happening by using dollars from their Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP) to reimburse FFN providers when the children they care for participate in the state's Pre-K program four days a week and have a weekly home visit.

The next steps in Minnesota are:

• to continue DHS FFN pilots with CCDF quality set-aside/ARRA stimulus funding (see Ready 4 K's Milestones article, "Family Friend and Neighbor Grants Renewed")
  
• create a webpage on the Child Care Resource & Referral network website devoted to FFNs
• further work from systems building efforts such as Build and MECCS and state departments to improve quality of FFNs