The Children's Trust has formed a strong partnership with Tufts University's Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development, in a decades-long collaboration of rigorous evaluation of the Healthy Families Massachusetts program. The Tufts Daily recently wrote about the process and methods of the reasearch.

“As independent evaluators, we provide feedback to the HFM program about the way in which the program is operating across the Commonwealth, how participants experience the program, and the program outcomes and impact,” Easterbrooks told the Daily in an email. “We are gratified that the Children’s Trust utilizes our research finding in fine-tuning program goals and practices, training home visitors, and working to enhance the lives of children and families.”

Tufts is doing longitudinal research to see the long-term effects of the HFM program, which serves parents and families from a mother’s pregnancy until the child’s third birthday, according to Dr. Rebecca Fauth, a project director at TIER.

Sarita Rogers, Director of the Healthy Families program at the Children's Trust, explained the impact this evaluation is having in the program.

“We are quite pleased with the results and are still looking at ways to continue strengthening our program,” she said. “This is also why we are committed to looking at the longitudinal effects of the program — we expect that we’ll see that children whose parents were in HFM are still thriving.”

Read the full article here.