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 Brazelton Touchpoints Center

The Brazelton Touchpoints Center at Boston Children’s Hospital, a Harvard Medical School teaching hospital, was founded in 1996 by T. Berry Brazelton, MD, and colleagues.  The Brazelton Touchpoints Center partners with family-facing providers, researchers, advocates, policymakers, and their institutions to listen to and amplify the unheard voices of babies, children, and families, and to co-create with them practical, incremental solutions to the challenges they express.