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Grant will provide mobile technology to help families raise safe, healthy babies

The UPS Foundation awarded a $10,000 grant in March to Family & Children’s Place to help provide mobile technology – laptops and mobile connections – to staff whose work takes place primarily in clients’ homes.

Family & Children’s Place is the leading agency working in Louisville and Southern Indiana to stop and prevent child violence, abuse, exploitation, and neglect, and to heal trauma from abuse when it is reported or discovered.

The UPS grant specifically will support HANDS, an evidenced-based preventive program designed to prevent abuse, ensure baby well care and immunizations, and assess for and promote developmental milestones.

The program provides intensive voluntary in-home visitation for new and first-time parents, including weekly education and intervention services for those identified at high risk for potential abuse or neglect. Last year, more than 750 families got help from HANDS, with 96 percent of those families abuse free after the child’s second birthday.

Family Support Workers (FSW) from the agency work in the field 70 percent of the time, visiting families that often don’t have access to the Internet or transportation, so they use mobile technology to deliver high quality services. These can include taking notes and keeping records, sharing educational videos, accessing community resources, creating resumes and other job help aids for families, working with families to apply online for benefits such as Social Security, and food stamps, and providing online training opportunities for families on issues such as budgeting and computer skills.

“This grant creates opportunities for even more efficiencies, for staff and families, provides access to more educational and community resources, real-time information about client engagement and activity and allows us greater insights into data so that we can continuously monitor and improve outcomes for these families,” said Pam Darnall, president and CEO of Family & Children’s Place.

“With this gift from the UPS Foundation, we can tackle child abuse on the front end through effective and compassionate services such as HANDS, which is having a dramatic and positive impact on the health and safety of children from birth to two years,” said Josh Swetnam, the agency’s vice president of Programs.