Davis Opening Statement at Worker & Family Support Subcommittee Hearing on the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) Program
(As prepared for delivery)
Mr. Chairman, I thank you for holding this hearing about the Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program one of our most important tools to strengthen families and help babies and children.
When talking about home visiting, I often invoke Frederick Douglass, who said, “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” Home visiting has a kind of magic in helping children thrive. In particular, participants cite the powerful partnership fostered by the way home visitors respect parents and guide them with resources and tools to raise healthy, happy children.
Home visiting has a special place in my heart. I introduced my first bill to provide dedicated support for home visiting with Senator Kit Bond and Representatives Tom Osbourne and Todd Platts in 2005. Later, both Senator Bond and Representative Platts helped enact MIECHV. In the 117th Congress, I had the honor of partnering with Representative Jackie Walorski to craft a historic five-year expansion of home visiting. The good news that our witnesses bring today is an important part of my legacy and that of my friend, Jackie, who was taken from us too soon.
Thanks to this Committee’s action in 2022, more parents are choosing home visiting, and MIECHV improves outcomes for them while also making children safer, healthier, and ready to start school. We are now halfway to our goal of doubling funding for home visiting and will reach it in 2027. Already, evidence-based home visiting has spread to more than half of U.S. counties, with the majority of these counties supported by MIECHV funding. In addition to directly helping families, MIECHV funding has improved broader state home visiting efforts - driving other home visiting sites to coordinate intake, shift to evidence-based approaches and more rigorously track outcomes. MIECHV now funds 14 different models, so states can choose the right approach for their families and communities. And we have already doubled the number of tribal MIECHV grants, with more to come over the next year. I’d like to ask unanimous consent to insert this article on the role home visiting can play in addressing developmental delays in tribal communities, which was co-authored by Dr. Paula Seanez, into the hearing record.
The Chairman and I are fortunate that our home state of Illinois has led the way in serving mothers and fathers. MIECHV helps our state provide home visiting to a thousand additional families, including vulnerable populations like expectant and parenting foster youth, and makes it faster and easier for families to connect with home visiting programs. Our state has used new funding provided in the reauthorization to expand services and increase wages for home visitors, and our program outcomes consistently exceed MIECHV targets. As funding to states and tribes grows over the next two years, so will the number of Illinois families able to give their children the best possible start.
Home visiting’s magic doesn’t happen on its own. It takes dedicated home visitors and administrators like the people on our panel today. It takes parents who love their children and embrace the resources and developmental knowledge shared by home visitors. And it takes all of us on the Ways and Means Committee, working together and fighting to get parents and evidence-based home visiting programs in our communities the support they need.
Today’s stories reflect the successes that grew out of our work in 2022, and I look forward to watching how Members of this Committee will build on MIECHV’s strong foundation in the next reauthorization.
###