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Hello, I'm Dr. David Willis, Director of HRSA's Maternal and Child Health Bureau's
Division of Home Visiting and Early Childhood Systems. I'm here to tell you about a new
funding opportunity - Early Childhood Comprehensive Systems: Building Health Through Integration.
This funding opportunity announcement (or FOA) is available on HRSA's web site, just
click on GRANTS or through Grants.gov as announcement number HRSA-13-177.
The purpose of this program is to improve the healthy physical, social, and emotional
development during infancy and early childhood; to eliminate disparities; and to increase
access to needed early childhood services by engaging in systems development, integration
activities and utilizing a collective impact approach to strengthen communities for families
and young children and to improve the quality and availability of early childhood services
at both the state and local levels.
This new emphasis on infancy and early childhood builds upon the goals and objectives of the
past 10 years of ECCS initiatives and emphasizes the recent scientific evidence regarding the
relationship between early experience, brain development, and long-term health and developmental
outcomes. In fact, lifespan trajectories for health, educational achievement and social-emotional
sturdiness have their foundations in these earliest experiences, intimately and individually,
beginning within the prenatal environment and building through the first months of caregiver-infant
interactions.
Subject to the availability of appropriated funds, HRSA anticipates awarding up to $7,800,000
to support up to 57 grants. Public or private entities, including Indian tribes or tribal
organizations (as those terms are defined at 25 U.S.C. 450b), and faith-based and community-based
organizations are eligible to apply. All applicants must have significant experience developing
and implementing state wide early childhood comprehensive systems strategies to build
the health of young children. Applicants have the option to plan, if necessary,
and implement one of three strategies: • Mitigation of toxic stress and trauma
in infancy and early childhood. • Coordination of the expansion of developmental
screening activities in early care and education settings
• Improvement of state infant/toddler child care quality initiatives by incorporating
10 or more Caring for Our Children: National Health and Safety Performance Standards;
All successful applicants will be required to build ECCS leadership in aggregating, aligning
and reporting on state early childhood benchmark data with national established MIECHV Benchmarks.
This effort builds commonality and critical documentation of the significance of building
health and developmental outcomes by early childhood investments.
This FOA is the first to pilot HRSA's new approach to soliciting applications for grant
and cooperative agreement funding. HRSA-13-177 Early Childhood Comprehensive Systems: Building
Health Through Integration is a program-specific announcement. It begins with a one-page Executive
Summary which will indicate at a glance program objectives, available funding, and if your
organization is eligible to apply. It is followed by text clearly stating program-specific goals,
expectations, and application requirements uninterrupted by general boilerplate information
applicable to all HRSA programs. This announcement cross references HRSA's SF-424 Application
Guide, a new resource developed and maintained by HRSA for preparing and submitting applications
through Grants.gov. The information in the Application Guide is broadly applicable to
the majority of HRSA programs, while our funding opportunity announcements will focus on individual
programs.
Let's walk through the Application Guide. We begin with HRSA's mission and information
about the agency. Section 2 includes general information highlighting
the responsibilities of a HRSA grant or cooperative agreement recipient.
Section 4 includes general instructions for application submission and includes a section
highlighting unallowable costs that regularly appear in applications. I would like to point
out that in addition to the generic requirements outlined in Section 4 of the Application Guide,
the applicant must also refer to Section 4 of the Program-Specific funding opportunity
announcement (in this case, HRSA-13-177) for instructions and requirements of the program.
It is our hope that this document used in conjunction with HRSA's SF-424 Application
Guide will make it easier for applicants to address the goals and objectives of the program
and thereby improve the quality and responsiveness of applications. Please read both documents
carefully as you craft your application.
A pre-application technical assistance call for HRSA-13-177 Early Childhood Comprehensive
Systems: Building Health Through Integration has been scheduled for Wednesday, March 13
at 3:00 PM Eastern Time. Specific information on how to participate can be found in the
FOA.
I'm Dr. David Willis. Thank you for watching.