Building Stronger Children, Families and Futures for 15 Years

By: Marcus Smith

Over the past 15 years, Connecticut Children’s Healthy Homes Program (Healthy Homes) has made quite an impact building stronger children, families and communities in Connecticut.

To date, Healthy Homes has made more than 2,500 housing units lead safe, while also eliminating hazards in about 350 housing units, installing safety equipment in more than 640 units, and educating more than 38,000 people about the dangers of lead poisoning.

To read more about our program through the years, click here.

We serve low- and moderate-income families in 15 Connecticut communities and expect to expand into two additional communities soon.

We are fortunate that much of our work is funded by state and federal grants. However, we have been successful in leveraging funding from private sources as well. One such opportunity recently came in the form of our “Last Dollars In” grant from Hartford Foundation for Public Giving that offsets the portion homeowners must pay when bids run over established project caps.

To find out if you are eligible, click here.

We are proud to be part of Connecticut Children’s Office for Community Child Health, which formed in 2012 to bring all of Connecticut Children’s community-oriented programs under the same umbrella. This allows better coordination between these programs and allows us to build synergy with external community-based programs in promoting children’s optimal healthy development.

Over the years, we have found many of the homeowners and residents we have helped had no idea the extent of lead and safety hazards in their homes. We have also found that they are often unaware of the harmful health effects exposure to lead can have, especially for young children.

To access our application for services, click here.

We are excited about the work we have done over the last 15 years to make a difference in Connecticut communities by building stronger children, families and futures. We look forward to continuing our important work for years, and even decades, to come.

Marcus Smith is the senior manager of Connecticut Children’s Healthy Homes Program, which is a program of Connecticut Children’s Office for Community Child Health.