G-2411-22198

Voices for Vermont's Children (Voices) is a statewide, multi-issue, child policy, research, and advocacy organization that works to shape the landscape around child well-being in Vermont through advocacy, community, organizing, research, and training.

Voices is a returning grantee and has since leveraged its past CareQuest Institute grant funding to launch and conduct a participatory community research effort to better understand systemic barriers driving oral health inequities in marginalized communities throughout Vermont. The project has engaged individuals and organizational partners and resulted in the publication of a Vermont oral health landscape report that consists of a data dashboard, survey and focus group results from individuals, benchmarks for current oral health policies and those under consideration, and the results of several organizational assessments that were designed to support cross-sector oral health engagement. Voices also produced an advocacy toolkit, featuring fact sheets, scripts, and templates for people to use to drive increased demand for minimally invasive care and medical-dental integration in their communities, as well as social media content to raise awareness of medical management of dental disease.

In 2025, Voices plans to prioritize three interrelated goals that combine community organizing, research, and public education. First, the organization will convene a grassroots children’s oral health action committee (COHAC) within a community that experiences significant pediatric oral health access barriers. The creation of this committee is meant to appeal to parents of young children and highlight a key population negatively impacted by limited access and empower them with knowledge, materials, and training to advocate for changes that integrate care. In addition to the COHAC, Voices will assess all pediatric practices’ readiness to explore oral health integration and identify barriers that could be addressed through policy change. The assessment will benefit from the state’s high rate of pediatricians who participate in the Medicaid program and will provide the organization with preliminary data to be used to support full adoption of integrated care ideals. Finally, Voices will work to increase the state’s investment in public health strategies and evidence-based models of care to increase access and improve oral health outcomes. This goal will benefit from the community engagement and research efforts the organization has proposed and will result in the production of a patient/resident story bank, video narratives, and an online dashboard.

The proposed project aims to drive the transformation of oral health care delivery to a patient-centered model that is based primarily on the needs of children, youth, and their families. Voices will track outcomes related to oral health access, like changes in SDF utilization, hospitalization rates for dental disease, billing for oral health procedures in primary care settings and more, during the project period. Trends between communities with which the project is engaged will also be monitored.

This proposal is being recommended for funding at the requested amount of $125,000, which will be used primarily to support project personnel across five positions. In addition to staffing, grant funds will support subgrants to organizational partners who take on specific roles within the project (e.g., co-leading the community of practice), incentives to recruit action committee and learning community members, and to cover expenses for translation/interpretation services. Overall, the recommended amount will make up approximately 27% of the organization’s overall budget.