GRANT00027

Continued support for the replication of the Building Successful Collaborative State Oral Health Consortium model implemented by the Massachusetts Head Start Consortium, to reach children in Pennsylvania. The PA Consortium concluded a successful first year of building community awareness around the importance of oral health, enhancing state-level community engagement strategies to improve the delivery of primary preventive oral health care. Continued funding will support the Consortium as they focus their activities on achieving the goals that they have set out for their project: develop effective state oral health collaboration and coalitions; promote Oral Health Education & Consistent Oral Health Messaging Across Medical, Dental, and Educational Homes; and Increase access to oral health care by connecting Head Start children to dental homes beginning with the age 1 visit. The Consortium will build upon the activities they began in the first year of the project, deepen their impact, implement targeted strategies to engage key stakeholders whose participation is critical to the success of their efforts, and begin to identify and assemble learnings from their state coalition building work that will be aligned with the Massachusetts model, and can inform future work in other states.