Abandoned Infants Assistance Programs:
Providing Innovative Responses on Behalf of Infants and Young Children (1995)

The infants and families served by AlA programs are among the neediest clients in the health and human services systems, beset by chemical addiction, HIV/AIDS, poverty, homelessness or inadequate and unstable living arrangements. Infants exposed to drugs and/or HIV in utero often need specialized health care and therapeutic interventions to help them recover from early physical and developmental traumas. Parents typically need assistance with housing and transportation, health care, drug and alcohol treatment, parenting and supportive therapeutic services to help them address the day-to-day challenges of their lives. The challenge for the AlA programs is substantial. The programs must mobilize and coordinate a variety of services from fragmented health and human services systems, and provide those services to a client population which is wary of the professional community and has little initial use for such interventions. Based on interviews with AlA program directors and staff and a review of program materials, strategies which constitute the core of innovative AlA services with drug-exposed and HIV/AIDS-affected families have been identified. These include:

• Interagency collaboration to coordinate service development and funding between multiple agencies serving the same population;
• Intervention teams which bring together professionals from a variety of disciplines in the planning and delivery of services;
• Peer services which use paraprofessionals from the community to provide outreach, education, and supportive services;
• Home-based services which provide educational, supportive, and therapeutic services in the home of the client;
• Culturally appropriate and women-focused services which adapt therapeutic interventions to reflect the cultural and ethnic influences in the lives of families and meet the needs of women, particularly those with young children;
• Coordinated medical and social services case management to reduce medically unnecessary hospital days and expedite hospital discharges to the most family like settings; and
• Legal, policy and program development to promote permanency for HIV-affected children and to help keep children orphaned by AIDS from entering the child welfare system when other resources can be identified.

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