Developed by Dr. David Olds and fortified by three decades of rigorous research, Nurse-Family Partnership is a nurse home visiting program that has been proven to improve the lives of low-income, first-time families and their children. Highly educated and experienced registered nurses regularly visit low-income expectant mothers (median age 19) during their first pregnancy and the first two years of their children’s lives, teaching them parenting and life skills and helping them gain access to job training and education programs.

President Barack Obama's domestic agenda calls for significantly increasing public investment so that Nurse-Family Partnership and other programs that meet its high evidentiary standard are available to all low-income first-time mothers. Nurse-Family Partnership has also received support from politicians from both parties and leading public policy organizations and advocates, including the Brookings Institution, The Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy, and Marian Wright Edelman of the Children's Defense Fund, for dramatically expanding its program.

The Rand Corporation calculates that every dollar invested in providing the program to the families at greatest risk returns $5.70, and every dollar spent on the average participating family returns $2.88, most of this in reduced government expenditures on health care, educational and social services, and criminal justice. According to the Washington State Institute for Pubic Policy, the program produces $18,000 in net benefits per family served.

Evaluation Status: Proven Effective

Three separate randomized, controlled trials were conducted over three decades among diverse populations at different locations. A 15-year follow-up of the Elmira, NY trial showed that mothers in the program were more economically self-sufficient and much more likely to avoid criminal behavior, and that their children led healthier, more productive lives, than mothers and children in the control group. Detailed information about these evaluations can be found on Nurse-Family Partnership’s website.

EMCF Investment

Since 2002, the Foundation has invested $20.3 million in Nurse-Family Partnership to develop and implement its business plan. In late 2003, Nurse-Family Partnership spun off from the University of Colorado and became an independent nonprofit, setting the stage and creating the organizational structure to scale up its programs significantly over the next decade.

In 2007, Nurse-Family Partnership began participating in EMCF’s Growth Capital Aggregation Pilot, an initiative to raise up-front all the capital the organization needed to implement an ambitious business plan to expand dramatically, serve greater numbers of low-income youth, and achieve financial sustainability. EMCF, five other foundations and Nurse-Family Partnership’s board of directors committed $50 million to help the organization reach its goal of expanding enrollment to 100,000 families annually by 2017.

For more information, visit Nurse-Family Partnership’s website at www.nursefamilypartnership.org.