Valuing children as our future, empowering the healthy development of families, and preventing child abuse and neglect

SERVICES
Healthy Family Initiatives’ direct services at no cost to client families include community outreach, education programs and piloted prevention models designed to strengthen families, remove risks, prevent child abuse and neglect, and expand the community’s capability to deliver prevention.

Children are our future, but that future depends on a healthy family environment. Both father and mother must take an active role in their child’s life. We can show them how to succeed in this.

We are proud of our more than a decade of achievement in the Healthy Families Houston program and of our recent designation as one of only seven sites in the country to participate in the federal demonstration evaluation project for the congressional Healthy Marriage Initiative’s Building Strong Families (BSF) model.

Building Strong Families is carried out under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, and in conjunction with the Texas Attorney General’s office and Texas Department of Health and Human Services. The program is specifically tailored to low-income, unmarried couples either expecting or who have just had a baby and is designed to help them develop a healthy relationship between themselves and with their child.

Healthy Families Houston program is the philosophical, core model from which all HFI’s work with families emanates. This voluntary program accepts families either pre-natally or at the birth of a child, and provides intensive home-based services for up to five years. The program’s goal is to remove the risk for child abuse and neglect by nurturing a child’s comprehensive developmental needs during the critical earliest years, ensuring consistent, timely and appropriate medical care for the child and family, and fostering increasing self-sufficiency for the family.

The Dads Make a Difference program is designed to integrate what is often a missing component essential to fostering a healthy family environment – the father. Through the program, fathers understand that providing financial and emotional support is a crucial and necessary component of a child’s development and lifetime success. The Community Doula program….

RESULTS
Positive outcomes of the Healthy Families Houston program consistently include greater self-sufficiency for the family within the community and virtually no reports of child abuse and neglect. Timely and age appropriate immunizations and wellness checks for children, improved parenting skills, dramatic increase in parent employment and education, and reduction in domestic violence are all proven outcomes of this program approach.

GOVERNANCE
Healthy Family Initiatives (HFI) is a 501 c 3 non-profit organization, chartered in 1982. Our focus is on strengthening families and the primary prevention of child abuse and neglect

HFI’s board is composed of men and women committed to eliminating child abuse and neglect and strengthening families. A dedicated staff of 26 professionals provides critical prevention and family strengthening services on a current annual budget of $2.2 million. Our revenue streams are diverse, with forty-four percent coming from government grants and contracts, forty-one percent from foundations, eight percent from the United Way (though not an affiliated agency, it provides unrestricted dollars for program implementation), six percent from individual contributions, and one percent from fees to provide prevention training to other organizations.