From Sharing Stories to Systems Change: Leveraging Home Visiting Workforce Success Narratives to Advance Well-Being and Social Impact

Background and Purpose

Home visiting programs support expectant parents and families with young children by promoting child development, strengthening family relationships, and improving overall well-being. Research has identified four dimensions of workforce well-being: job satisfaction, psychological well-being, self-efficacy, and a sense of meaning and fulfillment. While field practice often emphasizes mitigating stress and burnout, fostering positive experiences—such as accomplishment, connection, and purpose—is equally critical. Meaning and purpose are key drivers of workforce well-being, suggesting that reflecting on accomplishments may strengthen professional fulfillment and resilience. Collecting successful stories from home visiting staff offers a strengths-based approach that reinforces these dimensions while elevating practitioner voice.

Additionally, program evaluation has largely overlooked broader social impacts. The Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) program uses six benchmarks with 19 measures that do not explicitly capture social impacts such as family empowerment and community partnerships. Thus, studying successful stories not only supports workforce well-being but also documents these often-missed social impacts, informing organizational and policy changes.

Methods

This qualitative study used data from the 2025 MIECHV and IDHS-DEC Home Visiting Workforce Survey (N = 138), administered by the Center for Prevention Research and Development at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. A total of 112 participants (70 home visitors, 42 supervisors) shared successes in response to an open-ended question. A strengths-based approach and Bronfenbrenner’s social ecological framework guided thematic analysis using NVivo, focusing on how participants defined success and how these narratives informed system changes.

Results

Successful stories reflected multilevel impacts. At the individual level, participants described finding meaning and purpose in their work, strengthening teamwork, improving professional skills, mentoring staff, and program tools and accreditation. At the family level, stories emphasized family stability, meeting basic needs, fostering engagement, building trusting relationships, enhancing parenting competency, connecting families to resources, improving education and employment outcomes, supporting child development, and language support. At the community level, participants emphasized building partnerships.

This study also produced actionable change. Participants were eager to share their successful stories and accomplishments, revealing a strong desire to elevate positive impacts of their work. In response, home visiting teams were engaged to collect success stories and team narratives, which were used to develop a home visiting video for presentation during National Home Visiting Week. This dissemination effort extends the impact of the research by amplifying practitioner and family voices and highlighting the broader social contributions of home visiting programs.

Conclusions and Implications

This study demonstrates how strengths-based research can generate impact beyond knowledge production. Sharing successful stories reinforced meaning and purpose while surfacing critical social impacts such as family empowerment and community partnerships have not captured in standard metrics. Findings informed policy and organizational strategies to improve workforce well-being. By strengthening the workforce and highlighting broader program impacts, this work contributes to explaining home visiting services - often challenging to convey – while improving services for families experiencing structural inequities, advancing social justice and the common good. Future research should assess the impact of these changes on workforce well-being and family outcomes.