Brazelton Touchpoints Center

April 2023

- April 2024

Ending Maternal Child Health Inequities By Transforming Funding to Enable Community-Driven Solutions, 2023

Through participatory consensus partnerships with community rooted and led organizations, the Brazelton Touchpoints Center will contribute to the expansion of their access to funding, infrastructure supports, and other resources, by working together toward the following objectives:

Creating a sampling of profiles of community-rooted and led programs working to reduce these racial and economic health inequities, that specify
• the needs and gaps they are uniquely positioned to address,
• their contextually driven approaches to generating evidence about the problems they seek to solve, and the implementation, impact and ongoing improvement of their solutions, and
• the barriers and obstacles that they face in implementing, sustaining, and spreading their work.
Distilling throughlines from these profiles to catalyze governmental and philanthropic funders’ innovations for less burdensome and more effective methods to support the critical work unique to community rooted and led organizations
Engaging funders in building on these findings to

• transform grantmaking practices, requirements and standards;
• facilitate equitable access to existing funding streams; and
• innovate new funding sources
• share and support the local adaptation of approaches uplifted in the report

Ending Maternal Child Health Inequities, 2022

This project explores what Maternal Child Health funding agencies can do differently to address racial disparities in maternal morbidity and mortality–from conception through the first 12 post-natal months.

Many policy and grant makers now recognize the essential role that community designed and driven programs play in advancing racial and economic equity. Many funders also now realize that current practices often exclude frequently under-resourced, over-burdened programs and that new approaches to vet, support, and evaluate their impact are needed.

In partnership with national birth equity experts and institutions, Brazelton Touchpoints Center will lead a process to co-create guidance on a broader range of means and measures for fostering and evaluating the efficacy of community-driven programs.

This is a planning grant, allowing Brazelton to convene and work with partners to design a process that will eventually lead to a compendium of community-driven programs that offer their own approaches to iterative improvement and efficacy assessment. This new compendium would help guide investments in programs created and implemented by and for communities in which maternal morbidity and mortality are largely driven by racial and economic inequity.

About the Brazelton Touchpoints Center

The Brazelton Touchpoints Center (BTC) provides professional and leadership development, organizational learning and change, and research and evaluation services for family-facing professionals in pediatrics, early childhood, infant mental health, children’s libraries and museums, home visiting, child welfare, and other fields. BTC is home to the Touchpoints Approach, the Brazelton Institute (Newborn Behavioral Observations system and Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale), the Indigenous Early Learning Collaborative, Family Connections, the Family-to-Family Real Talk Series, and the BTC Research and Evaluation team. At BTC, we are dedicated to creating a lasting community in which equity, diversity, inclusion, belonging, and access thrive.

BTC is based in the Division of Developmental Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital, the nation’s leading children’s hospital (US News and World Report) and a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School .

Additional Projects

North Carolina Community Health Workers Association

2023

National Association of Community Health Workers

2023