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new organization, Good Beginnings Australia (GBA), also embraced the concept, for
similar reasons as those touted by Krugman (1993).
Good Beginnings’ initial four volunteer visiting pilot sites included professional
home visitors in two locations (Wellesley, 2000). In 2000 and 2001, Good Beginnings
staff presented at conferences and workshops, touting the benefits of having volunteer
and professional visitors within the same program (Prichard & Polglase, 2001; Wellesley,
2000). However, at the time of this writing, most of Good Beginnings Australia’s
volunteer visiting programs have closed, and GBA’s site in Hobart, Tasmania is their only
program that still has both professional and volunteer home visitors. 6 While Good
Beginnings Australia has produced a few evaluation reports over the years, these have
been focused on volunteer visiting, not on the combination of volunteer and paid
visitors (Cant, 1999; Good Beginnings Australia, n.d.; Hiatt, 1994 as cited in Byrne &
Kemp, 2009; The Benevolent Society, 2009).
In the previously mentioned 2004 systematic review of evaluations of volunteer
home visiting programs, there is no mention that some of the programs have both
volunteer and paid visitors (Black & Kemp, 2004). In Byrne and Kemp’s 2009 review of
program evaluations, however, the researchers excluded a handful of programs that
had both paid and volunteer visitors on the grounds that these were not purely
volunteer programs.
As noted previously, the 1990 evaluation of the Dublin-based Community
Mothers Programme involved families who were visited by the program’s volunteers,
but not those visited by Community Mothers’ nursing staff. Some other mixed-delivery
programs have also conducted research and/or program evaluations; I do not know
whether staff-visited families were excluded from, or included in, these reports (Black &
Kemp, 2004; Cant, 1999; Paris & Dubus, 2005).
6 Good Beginnings Australia’s Hobart site was a participating program in the present
study.
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