Impacting Social Issues by Supporting the Healthy Development of Children and Families

Supporting Prevent Child Abuse America means making an investment in the kinds of outcomes we all want for new parents and children:

• Furthering their education and job training
• Becoming more self-sufficient financially
• Developing more confidence and positive attitudes about themselves as parents
 
Young children:
• Improving the health and development of young children
• Improving health care
• Improving school performance

Prevent Child Abuse America also supports children and families through our signature prevention program, Healthy Families America. HFA is an evidence-based home visiting program designed to work with overburdened parents who are at-risk for adverse childhood experiences. Currently, HFA has 614 sites across the nation that support 95,000 families annually.

One of the best parts about what we do at Prevent Child Abuse America is that by working to support the healthy development of children and families, we can make an impact on a host of other social problems at the same time. By increasing opportunities for children to succeed and helping create stable, nurturing relationships not only between parent and child but throughout communities, we can help make a difference in poverty, education, violence prevention, and more.

Walk us through a “typical” day in your shoes. How are you making an impact through your work?

As someone who works in communications, it’s always exciting to open my email in the morning and see who is interested in learning about our work and how they can play a role in healthy child development. We work with reporters, both responding to their requests and creating our own content with the goal being to change the focus from negative, crime and death-driven reporting to a discussion on proactive solutions that allow the public to see these stories from a different perspective. But my favorite requests come from young children doing school projects, teens taking initiative to make a difference on their own, and parents who want to know what they can do to help others. We help these individuals with their goals, and we also partner with other companies and organizations – like Verizon and Macy’s or Sigma Delta and Kappa Delta Tau – to increase the collective impact that we are all making.

What do you find most rewarding about your job at the end of the day?

The most rewarding part about my job isn’t that I get to end every day and say “I made a difference,” but that I get to look at all of the people who we’ve worked with that day and say “they wanted to make a difference, and we helped that.”

Our thanks to Zach Hiner, External Communications Manager, for sharing his time and expertise with us!  To learn more about the impact Zach and his organization are making, visit their website and connect with them at www.preventchildabuse.org.  Click here to support their work with a donation.

The primary goal for any nonprofit is to get people to support that nonprofit’s cause so they can make an impact. But, behind each of those causes are hard-working individuals, actively involved in making that impact happen. Through our Making Impact Blog Series, we’re going behind the scenes with America’s Charities member organizations to learn how they’re making impact happen and share insights and advice from the staff and volunteers supporting these initiatives.