Moving the work forward

The Colorado Partnership for Thriving Families is reimagining what it looks like to create the conditions for strong families and communities where children are healthy, valued, and thriving. Statewide representatives of public health, human services and healthcare systems collaborated over the last several months, using the data to understand the needs of Colorado families and begin working towards positively and proactively supporting strong and healthy family formation to achieve the Partnership’s goal of significantly reducing child fatalities and child maltreatment for all children zero to five. Just this week, the Partnership finalized its priority areas, associated goals, and desired short-term, intermediate, and long-term outcomes.

To achieve its goal, the Partnership will prioritize aligning state and county systems to place family well-being at the center, strengthening the well-being services offered to young families, and improving social connectedness in order to better support parents and reduce their stress. The focus on these priority areas is intended to increase well-being for children and families, as measured by a variety of outcomes, including improved birth outcomes, improvement in caregivers’ mental and physical health, and increased economic security and community engagement of families.

The Partnership knows that risk and protective factors for family well-being and child maltreatment are not randomly distributed among families and communities. They are closely linked to the uneven distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges. Thus, the Partnership must work to decrease racial and ethnic disparities in well-being among children, caregivers, and families through ongoing examination of how implicit bias and explicit discrimination have shaped the systems and services currently in play and continuous engagement in course-correction with an anti-racism and anti-discrimination focus.

While the Partnership’s overall, long-term focus is on families prenatal to five, the data is clear: families prenatal to one in Colorado have the most to gain from improvements to the systems that support them. With this knowledge, the Partnership has committed to placing an initial focus on families in this formative phase across all of its work and priorities.

The Partnership firmly believes that in order to achieve these desired practice, policy, and systems changes, families must be engaged and empowered as leaders, advocates, and trusted partners in the co-creation of solutions. With this belief at the center of the work, the Partnership is integrating family voice into its leadership structure as well as at all other levels of the work.

With its priority areas and their related goals established and a shared commitment to being driven by family voice and the advancement of equity in family well-being, Colorado Partnership for Thriving Families is prepared to move full steam ahead to create a Colorado with the conditions for strong families and communities where children are healthy, valued, and thriving.

Interested in being involved? Please reach out to Hattie Landry to learn more.