Maternal and early childhood health is a public issue that requires creative planning, strategizing and collaboration to remedy. This application seeks to complete an implementation-ready social determinants of health accelerator plan with collaboration from a multisectoral leadership team with the goal of decreasing the number of Black babies born with low birth weight, eliminate barriers to prenatal care within lower socioeconomic status neighborhoods, and improve health and social outcomes for Black mothers and children while addressing the epidemic of systemic racism within the healthcare system. As a team, we plan to think collaboratively and proactively to address the public health issues within our community by hosting community conversations, sending out surveys and engaging lived experience from community members.
By the conclusion of the project period, we aim to have multiple outcomes achieved. The outcomes for this project include: increased collaboration and engagement across multisectoral partners, completed implementation-ready Social Determinants of Health Accelerator Plan, and identification of early indicators of development health in early childhood. Additionally, we have laid out both immediate and long-term outcomes as a result of this project. Those outcomes include: increased number of mothers receiving prenatal care, increased number of teens reached for education and awareness, increased number of children receiving early intervention services, increased community resilience to respond to, withstand, and recover from adverse situations, and increased education and access to prenatal care within the Black community. Lastly, our long-term goals include: a decrease in the number of Black babies born with low birth weight, a decrease in the infant mortality rate for Black children, eliminating barriers to
prenatal care within lower SES neighborhoods, and improved health and social outcomes for Black mothers and children. In order to track these outcomes, a data dashboard will be created and shared amongst community stakeholders.