Help Me Grow

Help Me Grow is designed to connect families with children birth through age eight to information about child development and to community resources. Parents and partners can dial United Way 2-1-1 to speak with a specially trained professional who can answer questions about children’s development, behavior, health or learning.

The Goal of Help Me Grow Florida is to promote healthy development for every child in Florida. Help Me Grow (HMG) is a unique, comprehensive, and integrated statewide system designed to address the need for early identification of developmental and/or behavioral concerns, and then to link children and their families to community-based developmental and behavioral services and supports.

Help Me Grow is an effective system because its efforts revolve around uniting a community to address the need for early detection through surveillance and screenings of children and building connections to community-based services and supports to address their needs.

What are the Help Me Grow components?

• A telephone access point that links families of young children with sources of support and services to address concerns about a child’s health, development, behavior and learning in a child’s first eight years of life.
• Child health care & education provider outreach trainings to educate our community about child development and the importance of early detection and intervention.
• Community outreach to promote the use of Help Me Grow and to provide networking opportunities for the community.

Sponsored by the Children's Forum, Inc.  and The Florida Department of Education Division of Early Learning.

Local Partners: United Way of Lee, Hendry, & Glades Counties and the Healthy Start Coalition of Southwest Florida.