Mothers Matter Centre
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Mission Statement
Our Mission: To empower isolated, at-risk mothers by helping them develop the knowledge and capacity they need to take control of their lives and become confident parents and engaged citizens. Our Vision: To foster a Canadian society where all mothers and children can achieve full potential and lead enriched lives.
About This Cause
The Mothers Matter Centre is a virtual, national consortium of organizations dedicated to serving socially isolated and low economic status mothers and their families using our proven mother-to-mother approach. Our flagship program is Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters (HIPPY), which educates mothers on how to prepare their preschool aged children during early childhood development. As we continue to grow and sustain HIPPY, we are developing other program innovations such as financial literacy, job-skills training, literacy and language training, healthcare, and more to provide these families with a broader spectrum of support. The work of the Mothers Matter Centre is consolidated in three pillars of change: SCALE, LEAD, and INSPIRE. 1. Scale a high-profile, sustainable, evidence-based social initiative called the Mothers Matter Centre. 2. Inspire social change by innovating, implementing, and supporting evidence-based programs in collaboration with Canadian communities that are motivated to support full inclusion of isolated mothers and their families. Inspire activities include Aboriginal and Multicultural HIPPY, professional education and program innovations. 3. Lead Canada in a movement for the social and economic inclusion of isolated women with research, knowledge-sharing and advocacy. Our work will continue to be research-based, with continuous program monitoring and refinement. We are committed to high-quality performance management standards, external evaluation and sharing knowledge. The Mothers Matter Centre headquarters are located in Vancouver, B.C., to support the organization’s national reach. How HIPPY Works HIPPY is an evidence-based program that works with families in the home to support parents, primarily mothers, in their critical role as their child’s first and most important teacher. HIPPY strengthens families and communities by empowering mothers to prepare their children for success in school. The HIPPY program consists of weekly home visits to HIPPY mothers’ homes by peer Home Visitors (often graduates of the program) and monthly group meetings. Home Visitors reach out to mothers who, due to social isolation, poverty, language, or other cultural issues, are hard to reach. Home Visitors ensure the mothers feel comfortable participating and are successful in the program. Home Visitors deliver high-quality child-centred curriculum activities directly to parents using role-play as a fail-safe method of teaching. Once they have received the training from Home Visitors, parents then work with their three-, four-, five-year-old children with the HIPPY curriculum for 15-20 minutes a day, for 30 weeks per year over three years. Monthly group meetings support mothers’ social integration and begin to establish support networks. There are several evidence-based outcomes to the HIPPY program. HIPPY Children demonstrate: • Improved academic performance compared to similarly situated children with positive outcomes for school readiness, reading ability and school behaviour. • Improved school readiness skills, school performance, English or French skills, self-esteem and self-confidence. HIPPY Mothers report: • Improved parent-child relationships, greater self-confidence, reduced isolation, and improved opportunities for expanding social networks and social support. • Acquisition of skills necessary to work with their children, confidence in their role as their child’s teacher, improved language skills, greater participation in their children’s school, and more time spent with their children on learning activities. HIPPY Home Visitors benefit from: • Employment (often first-time) for mothers who typically experience multiple barriers to employment. • Workplace training on HIPPY curriculum, community resource network systems, rights and responsibilities of Canadian citizenship, and employment skills. • Goal-setting and job-search support to transition Home Visitors to other jobs and/or higher education following their three-year work / learn position. • Home Visitors, once isolated mothers, are now highly employable members of society who contribute to the economic well-being of their families and communities. Performance Management Mothers Matter Centre is a high-performance organization committed to a comprehensive performance management process (PMP) that holds itself accountable to its stakeholders, funders and, most important, to the families it serves. Mothers Matter Centre has moved beyond counting outputs. We are all about change – about social impact – about ensuring the lives of the families with whom we work are, in fact, better than before we started working together. The Mothers Matter Centre PMP was rolled out nationally in Autumn 2013. Using the ETO (Efforts to Outcomes) data collection software and the PMP, Mothers Matter Centre and site staff now have access to timely and accurate information for monitoring program progress and evaluating actual versus intended outcomes. This tool gives Coordinators real-time data they need to adjust programming strategies to better serve their clients. Most important, the performance management approach helps Mothers Matter Centre measure and understand the process of change. Each year, Mothers Matter Centre releases a document that captures a description of efforts exerted and change measured over the last year. To ensure high-quality data, Mothers Matter Centre invests considerable time and training to ensure that Coordinators and Home Visitors across the country have sufficient expertise to understand how to enter and use the data derived from the PMP. We are increasingly confident in the quality and completeness of the data collected as each site gains experience year to year; however, we continue to scrutinize all data carefully when interpreting the results. History HIPPY Canada was piloted in 2000 at the Britannia Community Service Centre in Vancouver, B.C. Now Mothers Matter Centre, our HIPPY programs have grown to 30 sites across Canada, including 12 Aboriginal and 18 Multicultural sites, each of which helps 35 – 100 families each year. The HIPPY programs are operated by community organizations, settlement and Aboriginal social purpose organizations (SPOs) and First Nations communities. In 2018, the HIPPY sites helped 1,298 families while employing 116 Home Visitors. Over the past 19 years, Mothers Matter Centre has helped more than 14,000 mothers gain new skills and build confidence and abilities essential to strengthening mother-child relationships. This means over 14,000 children were better prepared to get the most from their early school experiences and many more than 28,000 lives have been positively impacted. The Mothers Matter Centre works with isolated mothers where they live – at home – and connects them with other mothers in their communities who share an intimate awareness of the issues and challenges they face. The Mothers Matter Centre continues training HIPPY Home Visitors to support mothers and their families transition out of isolation and into community and economic life, expanding HIPPY with important program innovations. Program Innovations 1. Bond to Literacy Bond to Literacy is a 12-week early literacy program adapted from the HIPPY program for low-income, disadvantaged families who struggle with issues that may prevent them from making a long-term commitment. Using HIPPY’s proven model of peer-to-peer program delivery, Community Facilitators are hired from the local community. This unique program approach helps Community Facilitators build skills and confidence and ensures they have first-hand understanding of the circumstances that low-income, low-literacy parents face. This empathy builds trust and collaboration between the Facilitators and families. Parents then take these new skills home and work with their children each day – returning to the group the following week to share their successes and challenges and support each other through the process. In Bond to Literacy, parents work daily with their children, reading and carrying out fun activities provided. They develop a habit of reading, playing, and sitting together with their child, which lays the foundation for a new, lasting pattern of parent-child time. The program has a proven track record of success and is actively facilitated in three provinces in Canada: Prince Edward Island: Chances Family Centre in Charlottetown; Saskatchewan: Open Door Society in Saskatoon; and British Columbia: Six locations across the province. 2. Adopt-a-Reader Campaign Recognizing Family Literacy Day, The Mothers Matter Centre hosts an annual Adopt-a-Reader Campaign. Each year more than five hundred HIPPY families reach out to parents outside the HIPPY program and encourage them to read to their children daily between January 27 and February 20 (Family Day) – with a total goal of 150,000 minutes of reading out loud. Last year we more than doubled our target with 300,000 minutes of reading reported. Goals Supported by ongoing efforts in each of its pillars, the Mothers Matter Centre seeks to elevate the organization’s national profile and provide leadership and guidance to enable active and interested communities in Canada to deliver the HIPPY program and other Centre innovations. The Centre is committed to growing and sustaining our flagship HIPPY program while also developing more program innovations pertaining to housing assistance, job-skills training, literacy and language training, healthcare, financial literacy and more. The Centre collaborates with Canadian organizations to launch HIPPY and other program sites and support them with their implementation by providing a robust performance management process, systematic professional development training to Site Coordinators and Home Visitors, and research and innovation. The Mothers Matter Centre has the ultimate responsibility to monitor these sites to ensure program fidelity and efficacious change results. The Centre will work with partners across the nation to innovate programs based on our mother-to-mother approach.