Elevating the Profession: How Maine Is Strengthening Home Visiting Through Innovation, Inclusion, and Intentional Leadership
When Ivory Mills talks about home visiting, she speaks with both professional clarity and personal conviction. As the Training and Technical Assistance Coordinator at Maine Children's Trust and co-state lead for Parents as Teachers (PAT), Ivory is helping to shape a more inclusive, responsive, and sustainable future for Maine’s home visiting workforce.
In a recent conversation with Janet Horras of the Institute for the Advancement of Family Support Professionals, Ivory shared how Maine is using the Institute’s framework to build a comprehensive professional development system—one that values lived experience, prioritizes staff well-being, and elevates home visiting as a distinct and respected profession.
Building a Professional Development System That Works
Maine’s engagement with the Institute began when PAT transitioned from its own competencies to embracing the Institute’s national framework. Initially, sites explored the resources for professional growth. But state leaders quickly saw the opportunity for something bigger.
Rather than requiring a bachelor’s degree for home visitors—a standard that often limits access to candidates who reflect the communities being served—Maine shifted to using the Institute’s certification exam as a neutral, competency-based assessment tool.
“We recognized that people had the skill sets,” Ivory explained. “They just needed additional support.”
The certification exam allows supervisors to assess strengths and identify areas for growth, without gatekeeping the profession through degree requirements alone. It also opens the door to hiring individuals with deep community roots—an essential strategy for reaching families in meaningful, culturally relevant ways.
To strengthen this approach, Maine partnered with Maine Roads to Quality, the state’s child care professional development network. By combining the Institute’s “compass” framework with Maine Roads to Quality’s career lattice, the state created a cohesive structure that integrates home visiting into the broader early childhood professional landscape.
The result? A system that is accessible, rigorous, and reflective of the field’s evolving needs.
Streamlining Onboarding Through Customized Solutions
When Ivory stepped into her current role, she inherited a detailed training log designed to create universal onboarding across sites. While comprehensive, it wasn’t as efficient or user-friendly as she hoped.
Then an email from the Institute about customizable training solutions caught her attention.
“It was exactly what we needed,” she said.
Now, Maine uses a streamlined, digital system that allows:
Supervisors to track staff progress in real time
The state to monitor professional development without excessive emails
Staff to share their profiles for oversight and accountability
The platform is intuitive and transparent, making onboarding more cohesive across the state.
Looking ahead, Ivory plans to convene a focus group of direct service staff to validate that the system works in practice—not just on paper. The goal is to ensure that implementation aligns with the lived experience of home visitors.
From Head Start Parent to State Leader
Ivory’s passion for workforce development is rooted in her own journey.
She began as a Head Start parent and worked her way through multiple roles—teacher, mental health and disabilities support, even cooking—before becoming a Family Services Coordinator supervising family advocates and home visitors. After nearly a decade in preschool classrooms, she transitioned into home visiting when her Head Start program piloted the model.
“I instantly fell in love with it,” she shared.
Today, she supports onboarding for new staff, leads the development of annual in-service trainings, provides technical assistance on fidelity and essential requirements, and continues refining Maine’s statewide training log.
Though she initially missed the direct daily connection to staff that came with her previous role, she now treasures conversations with new home visitors.
“They bring such beauty to an overlooked and misunderstood profession,” she said.
Defining Home Visiting as Its Own Profession
One persistent challenge in the field is identity. People understand what nurses and teachers do. But when they hear “home visitor,” there’s often a pause.
Home visiting draws from nursing, education, and social work—but it is not fully defined by any one of them. As Janet noted, the field has long borrowed professional identities rather than claiming its own.
That’s part of the reason the Institute created National Home Visiting Week—to give the profession visibility and recognition.
The certification exam was also designed to move the field beyond debates over which degree is “best.” As Janet candidly shared, formal education does not always prepare professionals for the unpredictable realities of walking into someone’s home.
By recognizing life experience alongside professional competencies, Maine is helping elevate home visiting as a distinct, skilled profession—one that deserves clarity, respect, and celebration.
The Workforce Challenge: Well-Being and Retention
When asked about the most pressing need in Maine’s home visiting workforce, Ivory didn’t hesitate: staff well-being and retention.
“The profession pulls out the best in people,” she said. “And it pulls out a lot from people.”
Home visitors are empathetic, nurturing, and deeply committed. They sit in vulnerable conversations inside families’ homes—spaces that feel very different from office settings. In today’s world, those conversations often carry the weight of broader societal stressors.
“The way the world is now makes the challenges feel ten times bigger,” Ivory reflected.
Staff give their all to families during the day, then return home to their own families—often navigating similar stressors themselves. The emotional labor is real.
Yet they continue to show up.
“They show up day in and day out as beautiful human beings,” she said.
Recognizing that reality—and celebrating it—is not optional. It is essential to retention.
Looking Ahead: National Home Visiting Week 2026
Last year, Maine created a video thanking staff, highlighted statewide impact data, secured a gubernatorial proclamation, and distributed letters of appreciation.
This year, they are thinking bigger.
Planning is already underway for National Home Visiting Week 2026, with a vision to:
Expand beyond Maine Families to include Early Head Start home visiting
Reduce silos and celebrate across programs
Engage board members in handwriting thank-you cards to staff
Begin building bridges toward including tribal home visiting programs in future celebrations
Ivory dreams of a day when all home visiting programs in Maine gather in one space—acknowledging the unique beauty each brings to the work.
“It’s all and,” she said. “Not either-or.”
National Home Visiting Week may be the stepping stone toward that broader, unified vision.
Leadership as a Verb
Ivory recently completed a leadership course emphasizing that leadership is a verb, not a noun.
“Anyone can be a leader,” she said.
She hopes to cultivate leadership within home visitors themselves—helping them see in themselves the same strength and potential they help parents see every day.
That philosophy aligns closely with upcoming national efforts, including a leadership academy launching this spring for home visiting professionals. As Maine continues refining its professional development system, leadership cultivation will remain central.
Moving Forward
With their digital badge created, focus groups on the horizon, and expanded celebration plans underway, Maine is demonstrating what intentional workforce development looks like.
By combining accessible professional standards, inclusive hiring practices, strategic partnerships, and a deep commitment to staff well-being, Maine is not just implementing the Institute’s framework—it is living it.
And in doing so, the state is helping redefine home visiting as the respected, essential profession it has always been.
For more information about Maine Children's Trust, visit https://www.mechildrenstrust.org