Grantee: Akin
Timeframe: July 2022 – June 2024 | Amount: $390,000
Year 1: July 2022 – June 2023. Amount: $190,000
Year2: July 2023 – June 2024. Amount: $200,000
Akin & Sea Mar Community Health Centers partner to reduce disparities in diagnosis of Developmental Delays and access to support services for young Latinx children in South King County with bilingual, culturally responsive Family Navigators.
Sea Mar has successfully supported Latinx adult patients through integrated Care Coordinators and Health Educators. However, they have not yet developed a similar model for pediatrics due to limited funding for non-licensed, non-billing roles. As such, no one is available to support families during developmental screening to explain the purpose of the questionnaires, the questions themselves, the results, or next steps. Ultimately, this means children are not connected to developmental services that are available in their community and critical to their long-term health and success.
Akin and their partners at Harborview and Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic (OBCC) have developed a model that effectively connects young children to services, particularly those who experience language and cultural barriers in the healthcare and education systems. Akin and Sea Mar will partner to create a similar model within the Seattle Medical Clinic to reduce access disparities in early childhood developmental services for the clinic’s Latinx patients by employing 2 full-time bilingual Family Navigators.
Funding from PHPDA will allow Akin to co-locate Family Navigators within the Sea Mar system as members of the healthcare team at the Seattle Medical Clinic in South Park. They will be employed by Akin to conduct relationship-based developmental promotion, culturally-responsive developmental screening, and referral case management for the clinic’s primarily Spanish-speaking South King County families of children 0-5 years old who desire their support.
This proposal builds upon Akin’s successful healthcare integration partnerships with Harborview Pediatrics and OBCC where 4 multilingual and multicultural Family Navigators (speaking English, Spanish, Somali, Oromo, and Amharic) conduct screening and provide case management for referrals to improve timely enrollment in developmental services.
About Our Grantee
In January 2024, Children’s Home Society of Washington and Childhaven merged to form the new organization, Akin. Two of Washington state’s most influential children and family support organizations combined resources and expertise to innovate and improve social services for a lifetime of family well-being. Akin exists to disrupt systemic and multi-generational cycles of inequity by partnering with children, families, and communities to transform population level health and well-being.
