Chittenden’s BBF Regional Council is currently working on updating our Regional Action Plan to better reflect a few new key priorities in our community. We plan to add pieces on supporting breastfeeding, aligning efforts to better serve families with substance use disorder, and keeping equity and inclusion at the center of our work. Measuring our impact is tricky, but we hope to strengthen our story by collecting and reporting meaningful data.
Our partnership with our Maternal Child Health Nurse is allowing us to come together in our efforts to improve the usage of the Universal Developmental Screening Registry and general adoption of Help Me Grow in the community. We are starting our joint work with our CIS Team, in hopes to break down barriers and discuss the benefits of the system. I recently had the opportunity to attend the Help Me Grow National Forum in early May and gained insight on what is working well in other states, and look forward to brainstorming how we can implement some ideas in our own community this summer, especially ideas around better partnering with medical providers, etc.
The Substance Use Disorder Planning Project has come to an end and we developed a number of great strategies with our stakeholders. We have written the strategies into the implementation grant, with hope to partner with Head Start, The Chittenden Clinic, and Child Care Resource to get our work off the ground if we are granted funding. Our main goal is the continuation of the network that the Community of Practice helped develop. Our collective learning has proven to be extremely valuable, as when we work on this issue as a cross sector group we can really make a large impact across multiple settings.
Bright Spot
Our Early MTSS leadership is gaining momentum and we will be holding a stakeholder group this month with representation from school districts, mental health providers, and childcare providers to help create a plan to support the existing Early MTSS work in our district, as well as develop a plan with next steps on how to move towards scaling up in Chittenden.
