Advocacy and Collaboration: LABBN Presents at the National Home Visiting Summit
The 2025 National Home Visiting Summit took place in Washington, DC, on February 12–14. Start Early, a nonprofit in Chicago that promotes early childhood development in underserved communities, hosted the event.
The annual conference integrates policy, practice, and research, with the goal of advancing equitable and high-quality home visiting services and systems. The Summit provides a platform to advance home visiting as a key component of early childhood support services.
The event included 3 plenary sessions, along with dozens of workshops and poster presentations. View the full agenda here.
LABBN’s Policy team (Anna, Laurel and Lynnette, who manage the L.A. County Home Visiting Consortium), along with LABBN Director Sharlene, presented a poster on “Keys to Stability: Exploring Housing Support Systems in Los Angeles County.”
Their poster presentation highlighted a webinar they hosted in July 2024, in collaboration with five housing agencies from various regions of L.A. County. The webinar provided home visiting staff and early childhood educators with resources to help address housing instability for clients and families.
During that webinar’s housing panel, participants learned about the application process, eligibility criteria, and available resources for crisis housing, eviction prevention, and rental assistance. They also discussed alternative strategies to support clients in need of housing, even when resources are limited.
On the second day of the Summit, the Policy team held a workshop presentation titled, “Lessons from the West: Los Angeles’ and Colorado’s Approaches to Collective Advocacy and Systems Building: Coordinating Organizations to Increase Collective Capacity in the Home Visiting Field.”
This was a collaborative presentation with Colorado’s Home Visiting Investment Task Force (HVITF), a private-public partnership that launched in 2020 to drive systemic change in home visiting funding and infrastructure.
The workshop delved into the landscapes and history of home visiting in L.A. County and throughout Colorado. The presenters talked about the importance of coordinating organizations to improve collective capacity in the home visiting field and how lessons from these regions can be adapted to other contexts to strengthen advocacy and systems-building efforts.
At each National Home Visiting Summit, Start Early hosts Capitol Hill visits to support home visiting advocates to meet with their Congressional leaders to raise awareness about home visiting and the federal priorities needed to boost its impact on families and communities.
LABBN’s Policy team met with Kyler L. Gilkey, who is a Legislative Assistant for Congresswoman Sydney Kamlager-Dove (CA-37). During their visit, the Policy team discussed Home Visiting Day, the Home Visiting eDirectory, and the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC), which can help to partially offset working families’ child care expenses.