Issue #22
Thursday, January 21st, 2010

Johnson & Johnson holds a number of employee blood drives throughout the year, and is one of the leading corporate sponsors of blood drives in the U.S. As part of the corporate credo at Johnson & Johnson, the employees asked that rather than receiving any gift or financial incentive for their own blood donations, that the corporate office instead provide a gift to local community groups.

 

Russell C. Deyo, Vice President, General Counsel of Johnson & Johnson
congratulates Executive Director Rush Russell on Prevent Child Abuse-New Jersey's $5,000 gift from Johnson and Johnson's employee blood drive program

 

Prevent Child Abuse-New Jersey was one of only three NJ-based organizations which were selected to receive a donation of $5,000 from this program. At the event, General Counsel for the Johnson & Johnson corporation, Russell C. Deyo, expressed his gratitude for the work we are doing. We extend our appreciation to Johnson & Johnson once again for their generosity. 

 

PCA-NJ Teams Up With PCA America For Federal Grant Proposal

Prevent Child Abuse-New Jersey was invited to be part of a proposal being applied for by Prevent Child Abuse America to the Quality Improvement Center for Early Childhood. The proposal was submitted to create a project that will develop, implement and evaluate new screening methods and interventions to address substance use, domestic violence, and mental health issues among families enrolled in the Healthy Families home visiting program to prevent child maltreatment. 

 

Prevent Child Abuse America will partner with Prevent Child Abuse-New Jersey and the Michigan Children’s Trust Fund, both of whom administer the Healthy Families Programs in their respective states. PCA-NJ will serve as a partner to help facilitate the design of this project, facilitate access to local sites, data coordination and collection and some level of project supervision within the state. MCTF and PCA-NJ will also partner with PCA America to pull together think-tanks with state and local leaders of substance abuse prevention, mental health, domestic violence, and child welfare systems, and will assist in convening planning sessions for the purpose of linking home visitation prevention work with these systems.

 

Statewide Meeting Builds Continued Collaboration Among New Jersey's Home Visiting Programs

Prevent Child Abuse-New Jersey and the NJ Department of Children and Families will convene a statewide meeting on February 3, 2010 to ensure continued collaboration and research-based practice among home visitation providers in the state. This statewide meeting, entitled Home Visitation in New Jersey: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, will facilitate discussion among more than 30 providers in the Healthy Families, Parents As Teachers, Parent-Child Home and Nurse Family Partnership home visitation models, to examine how evaluation and coordinated service delivery will continue to benefit families and children. The dialogue builds on long-term efforts to ensure that New Jersey's home visiting models, varied by their intensity of intervention and delivery by different provider disciplines, collaborate to provide a continuum of care for vulnerable parents of very young children. Discussion will also focus on how home visitation programs can address domestic violence, mental health and substance abuse among the most significant family risk factors for and correlates of child abuse.

 

More than 25 years of research have documented home visiting as a well-accepted prevention strategy for improving the health and well-being of women, children and the overall family, particularly those who are at-risk. In New Jersey, where only 73% of the state's children are immunized by the age of 2 and only 75% of mothers get early prenatal care, 87% of children in Healthy Families home visiting programs are immunized and 86% of participating women receive prenatal care.

 

Prevent Child Abuse-New Jersey has led efforts to bring evidence-based and nationally-recognized home visitation programs, including Healthy Families and Parents As Teachers, to the state since the early '90s, and now serves as the state affiliate for both of these models. Expect ongoing coverage of the meeting dialogue, and related meeting outcomes, to be shared at www.preventchildabusenj.org.

Volunteer Spotlight #2

Melissa Kowalczyk, a senior at Rider University, is working with the Development Department here at Prevent Child Abuse-New Jersey. Melissa learned about PCA-NJ from a neighbor, and believed in the mission of the organization so much that she offered her time. While in the office, Melissa works to update our contact information database, and has begun to help with organization for Child Abuse Prevention Month this coming April.

 

 

"On the train ride here once, a guy asked me why I was coming [to New Brunswick] because school was out, so we got talking," Melissa recalls. "When I was getting off the train, he said 'Keep doing what you're doing for us' as if to say that everyone always wants to volunteer their time, but they wind up depending on other people to do that. If everyone started doing it, we could make more of a change in a lot of things."

Podcast Episode 20: Social Media & Networking at Prevent Child Abuse-New Jersey