Happy Anniversary

In 2019, we celebrated 20 years as a national children’s health organization—that’s 20 years working passionately to ensure that all children across the country have an equal chance to live healthy and fulfilling lives, to reach their potential and pursue their dreams. As we move into 2020, we're energized both by what we've accomplished and by what we'll strive for in the decades to come.

Our first 20 years were a testament to people like you—nurses, doctors, educators, public health professionals, dedicated families, mission-driven foundations and government entities—our vast network of partners in improvement and advocates for change.

Here’s to you and the incredible years of change ahead!

Music: Towards New Horizons by Keys of Moon | https://soundcloud.com/keysofmoon Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Charting a Vision for the Future

Our mission calls us to bold action, to build capacity and drive change in communities least empowered to give their children the brightest futures—communities with a disproportionate number of children living in poverty, children affected by the opioid crisis, children in the child welfare system, and children devalued by racial bias. By supporting our country's most under-resourced communities, we can help improve health for our nation’s children, now and into the future.

Watch our video and think big with us.

Changing Systems,
Changing Lives

During the past 20 years, we led over 80 initiatives and reached millions of children and families. Our unique approach to improving children’s health systems gives more families access to care and coordinated services, and helps more children achieve better outcomes. Together with our partners, our work has helped the country achieve real changes in children’s health:

National infant mortality rates decreased by 5 percent, saving hundreds of babies every year
Over 200,000 more babies and mothers receive the life-changing benefits of breastfeeding every year
Over 10,000 more children with sickle cell disease have access to quality care
95 percent of children confirmed with hearing loss nationwide referred for early intervention
The birth of a ground-breaking partnership of early childhood development stakeholders, spanning 12 states and 28 communities

Thank you to our 20th Anniversary campaign corporate and foundation sponsors!

Century Bank, NICHQ’s bank for nearly two decades, is New England's largest family-run bank. Century Bank shares NICHQ’s commitment to empowering communities so that all children and families can lead happy, healthy and fulfilling lives.

Agaric, a web development agency that has partnered with NICHQ to design our website and the NICHQ Collaboratory. As a cooperative focused on empowering others in the digital space, Agaric shares NICHQ’s commitment to using digital tools to help all children and families reach their optimal health.

Commonwealth Children's Fund is a philanthropic initiative whose mission is to ensure the best possible start in life for Massachusetts’ youngest residents, ages 0-5, so that they may learn and thrive throughout their lives.

What People Are Saying

Our work to improve children’s vision and eye health in the U.S. has always centered on big ideas and massive systems shifts, thus we found the process of continuous quality improvement to be an exciting new way to tackle the challenges we face in our work.

Kira Baldonado-Project Partner

NICHQ has really supported our work by formalizing a process to do PDSA cycles, report and track how our progress is doing. As a data person, CoLab has been really instrumental in terms of gathering the data and tracking it over time.

Vikrum Vishnubhakta, Data Lead

I am so impressed by the processes that the NICHQ staff use so well to enable teams in many different locations to learn and share, to practice QI processes, to support and inspire each other. NICHQ helps busy people find time to do important and difficult work that improves clinical practice, and to sustain the changes they themselves developed. I’m lucky to have been connected to NICHQ!

Elizabeth G. Crockett, PhD, RD, CDN, CLC-Project Participant

For me, NICHQ is uniquely positioned to support complex, system-based efforts to improve child health and healthcare, locally and on a national scale. NICHQ helped my teams succeed by supporting collaboration, information management, and continuous learning. With NICHQ's help, the whole of our work was much greater than the sum of each of our individual efforts!

Bill Adams, MD

It has been an honor to work with NICHQ as a Parent Faculty member. I admire how NICHQ continues to center their work around the people directly impacted by it: families and children. They actively work to include these voices throughout project implementation, ensuring that policies remain grounded in patient experiences and feedback. The expertise and professionalism of NICHQ staff has meant that I always feel supported, and confident that all stake holders are included in the process.

Rebekka Henriksen-Parent Partner

I feel like I am always learning when I am exposed to NICHQ. I am actually really going to miss it when this collaborative ends!

Laura Corsig, IBCLC-Project Participant

Working with NICHQ, I have been able to assist communities all over New York State with their breastfeeding care efforts. The NICHQ staff is experienced, organized and thorough, ensuring each interpersonal interaction is maximally engaging and productive. Because of the way change efforts are organized, I find myself learning new procedural and educational techniques, and even more about my own field! Thanks to NICHQ for including me on this interesting ride.

Casey Rosen-Carole, MD, MPH, MSEd, IBCLC-Project Faculty

I was very hesitant about quality improvement in the beginning but NICHQ reformed me. I have been working within our region and our state with health partners for years, but we have made more progress working with NICHQ through your learning process and collaboration than with any other group.

Ed Dzedzy-Project Participant

I'm passionate about early identification and connection to services and supports for children and families because we know acting early makes a difference. When I learned that the ECCS CoIIN leverages collaboration, innovation and quality improvement methods to improve early childhood systems, I was thrilled to get involved. There is a great focus on parent engagement too, so I was really happy to join the team and be a part of this great work.