Hello Family initiative seeks to improve outcomes for Spartanburg's most vulnerable

At a recent City Council meeting, City Manager, Chris Story gave an overview of Hello Family, a proposed collection of support systems that would seek to improve outcomes for young children and their families by providing a continuum of evidence-based services for all children born in the City of Spartanburg from prenatal care through age five. Designed to significantly improve child wellbeing, boost future prosperity, and provide quantifiable financial benefits to our community well in excess of its cost, Hello Family would bring a number of existing services in the city under one umbrella in order to link their efforts and produce verifiable results by focusing on early intervention strategies. Based on the work of James J. Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who found that investing in programs targeted at the earliest years of life yield the most lasting and cost-effective results, Hello Family seeks to improve birth outcomes, reduce child abuse and neglect, and improve kindergarten readiness throughout the City of Spartanburg. Today on the podcast, we sit down for a conversation with Story to get an overview of the challenges the program would seek to address and the strategy it would employ to do so. Listen below for more.