Granite VNA Healthy Families America Family Support Specialist Sarah Love was recently honored with New Hampshire Home Visiting Learning Hub’s Shining Star Award for her excellence in family support.

The Shining Star award honors team members in one of the New Hampshire home visitor programs – Healthy Families America, Comprehensive Family Support Services, Kinship Navigation, and/or Newborn Navigation programs – who displays a strong work ethic, strive to strengthen their skills and expand their knowledge to better serve the families in their community. Honorees bring a compassionate, strength-based, family-centered, culturally sensitive, and reflective approach to their interactions and exemplify the ability to form healthy, trusting relationships with the families they serve, their co-workers, and community members.

Love’s peer nominators highlighted her ability to quickly connect with parents, establish trust and help them feel seen, heard and valued to empower them on their journey to confident parenting. Her dedication, compassion, and passion for helping parents develop skills and confidence shines through during every family visit. One nominator noted that Love is, “the soul of home visiting on every front.”

“I’m so grateful to work with Healthy Families America-New Hampshire, and it is an honor to be recognized for the work we do to help families build skills and strengthen their support systems to help them be successful,” said Love. “I’m thankful for the opportunity to support our community in this way – it’s truly an amazing feeling to be welcomed into a family’s home as the first branch of their support system. Parenting can be isolating and lonely – I wish I had a program like this available to me as a young parent.”

Love has served as an HFA Family Support Specialist for three years, following a career in early childhood education. In this role, she is invited into young families’ and first-time caregivers’ homes to help support their well-being by connecting them to resources for food and housing, helping build a trusted support system, and discussing and setting child development goals. She serves families residing in Belknap County, portions of Merrimack County and Southern Grafton County.