Vital Village Network

Vital Village is a network of residents and organizations committed to maximizing child, family, and community well-being. Our place-based, community engagement network mobilizes collective investment from residents, community organizations and institutions to seed scalable and sustainable community change around child protection and promoting healthy social and emotional development in early childhood. The Vital Village Network is using a collective impact approach to supporting deeper collaboration among educators, clinicians, social service providers, legal advocates and residents to strengthen prenatal, early childhood education, and economic security and preventive legal resources that support family and community protective factors. We have developed hubs of innovation within and a formal collaborative network across three Boston Neighborhoods: Dudley (Roxbury/North Dorchester), Mattapan, and Codman Square (Dorchester). We align preventive efforts across sectors to enhance existing services for children. This approach is sustainable because we embed community-driven preventive strategies in the context of existing systems for child health and education and community development. We strive to connect and strengthen opportunity structures that support protective factors and family strengths within existing community resources. We couple community-based participatory research and improvement science methodology to drive progress.