Westside Infant-Family Network

Westside Infant-Family Network (WIN) provides free mental health care to families with infants and toddlers. They partner with three organizations, Westside Children's Center, Venice Family Clinic, and St. Joseph Center in West Los Angeles, to create an integrated, cross-sector system of care for families, in their own communities, through the agencies they already use. All WIN clients are low-income and live in underserved communities.

WIN focuses on optimizing early child development by helping families deal with mental health issues before they permanently impact the health and development of their children. They do this by providing free psychological assessments, therapy, and case management to families who are existing clients of their partner agencies. This includes weekly in-home mental health services with bilingual therapists and comprehensive cross agency case management with bilingual case managers. In addition, WIN provides training for staff, clinicians and parents in the community on how to recognize, address and prevent mental health issues in families with prenatal through three-year-old children.

This program is funded by multiple foundations and private donors.

Westside Infant-Family Network’s mission is to ensure that families with prenatal through three-year-olds receive the mental health care and community resources they need to strengthen their families and achieve healthy parent-child relationships.

From July 2010 to December 2010, WIN provided case management and/or mental health therapy services to 216 family members, and professional-level training to 151 individuals. During this time, 93% of WIN children showed developmental improvement as measured by the Ages and Stages Questionnaire, and 96% of WIN children showed improvement with secure attachment as measured by the Parent-Infant Relationship Global Assessment Scale. In addition, 67% caregivers showed stress level improvement as measured by the Parenting Stress Index-Short Form.