Shared Waters Tribal Home Visiting Program
About Shared Waters Tribal Home Visiting Program
Nearly a decade ago, two tribes–Crow Creek and Lower Brule–made a decision to come together around a new program to support the health and wellbeing of Native children and families across both tribal communities. In 2018, the Shared Waters Tribal Home Visiting Program officially launched their services–designed to provide culturally-grounded, evidence-based services to help pregnant women and families of young children increase their knowledge on early childhood development and hone the skills they need to raise children who are physically, socially, and emotionally healthy.
Through a significant federal grant from the Tribal Maternal Infant Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) Program, part of the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), Shared Waters leverages the wisdom of parent educators with deep experience in providing support to help families thrive. Each educator visits with individual families in their own homes to offer personalized guidance around early childhood development and how to provide a nurturing environment that will prepare children to learn when they enter kindergarten.
Challenges and Opportunities
As part of its initial grant, Shared Waters needed to assess the impact of the program’s model, design, and service-delivery. They brought on an evaluation team, but ultimately felt their data collection tools and practices lacked the cultural grounding to align with the community’s needs and norms. For that reason, they turned to Emergence’s Director of Advancement Systems and lead evaluation practitioner, Audrey Fallis, who had previously worked with the project and came with an in-depth understanding of the organization’s values and mission. Audrey stepped in to help Shared Waters finish out their formative evaluation. Once Shared Waters secured an expansion grant to support and grow services for another five years, Audrey began working with the team to advance their evaluation strategies–to better understand community needs and their ability to meet them.
Approach
As a tribal member herself, Audrey understood the critical importance of designing a culturally-relevant evaluation that would meet the needs of the organization and the community members it serves. She began creating weekly data meetings with the Shared Waters internal team–with the aim of identifying and celebrating data wins and integrating practices into their work that would ultimately help them demonstrate the program’s impact and expand their grant funding. Because storytelling is a core form of communication for many Indigenous peoples, Audrey emphasized the importance of drawing on stories as a vital source of qualitative data. Historically the reflections and voices of program participants have been undervalued as a source of evaluative data, but Indigenous evaluators like Audrey are helping emphasize the need to lift up Indigenous storytelling to truly understand the impact of programs serving Indigenous communities. Through her evaluation design, Audrey focused on bringing participant voices to light–-and helped the Shared Waters team embrace evaluation and data collection as a method for telling the overarching story of the program’s support for children and families.
In addition, Audrey supported the development and implementation of a comprehensive community needs and readiness assessment–to gather vital information from the community on what they wanted from a home visiting program. She led the designing of a survey and hosted focus groups with community members to gather more stories as a rich source of data. In addition, she helped to conduct interviews with key partners to better understand the landscape of services available across tribal communities and how Shared Waters could fill gaps in services to better meet community needs. To ensure community leadership of this process, Audrey supported Shared Waters in creating an advisory committee entirely of community members–including program participants, partner organizations, and other service providers–to help guide conversations with families around program design and impact.
Impact
Implementing a comprehensive, culturally-grounded evaluation strategy has led to a range of powerful impacts for Shared Waters–from deepening the leadership of its internal team to leveraging the power of community-centered data collection and storytelling to articulate the needs and values of the families it serves.
As Shared Waters’ integrated data gathering into their work, they were able to report increasing their impact in 5 of their 6 core benchmarks over the last year, including increasing:
Caregiver knowledge and skills in early childhood development and positive parenting practices
Early childhood literacy and school readiness through the detection of developmental delays, and
access to supportive services that address challenges to living necessities, with a focus on decreasing the occurrence of child abuse and neglect.
In addition, Shared Waters is deepening its relationships with community-based organizations and service providers, with the goal of strengthening a broader ecosystem of support for local children and families. The asset map Audrey created as part of Shared Waters’ community needs assessment has allowed the Shared Waters team to understand the program’s relationships with organizations and services across its service communities.