Thursday, April 10, 2025
4/10/2025
Supporting Maternal and Child Health Innovation in States - To achieve a world where everyone can live long, healthy lives, we must deliver robust maternal, prenatal and early childhood health supports from the beginning. Central to those supports is access to nutritious, affordable and culturally relevant foods, a core determinant of health. Women, children, and people of color are disproportionately impacted by nutrition insecurity. American Indian and Alaska Native, Black and Hispanic households experience nearly double the rates of food insecurity compared to white non-Hispanic households, and single-mother household have some of the highest rates. As programs like WIC and SNAP reflect, improving nutrition security is an effective intervention for reducing health disparities for maternal child health (MCH) populations and others. Policy is an important tool to implement and amplify nutrition security programs. We propose to deliver legal capacity-building technical assistance to accelerate state and local policy innovation for better MCH outcomes, with a focus on policies to improve access to affordable, nutritious, and culturally relevant foods. We will create a Learning Community (LC) of state and local health officials and community members with relevant lived experience from 10 states, distributed across 5 geographic regions, who are ready to engage in policy work focused on nutrition security for MCH populations. We will focus on policies to support nutrition security for low-income children from prenatal to age 5, and low-income teens and adults who are pregnant, postpartum, or of child-bearing age, especially those with babies or young children (collectively, “MCH priority populations”). We will also support policy work related to other priority topics and emerging issues identified by the Health Resources & Services Administration (HRSA) and the Maternal and Child Health Bureau. We will provide legal technical assistance (TA) to LC members, HRSA partners and MCH stakeholders, and will work with partners to co-create a library of 24 legal TA resources to support MCH policy work. Our Project will result in at least 6 policy initiatives at the local and/or state level in at least 6 jurisdictions and will build the field’s capacity to sustain policy work beyond the Project. The Center has a national perspective and deep expertise in state and local public health policy work to deliver these goals. For 24 years, we have worked with public health departments and their partners to develop and implement effective, equity-centered policy solutions rooted in community priorities. We work with public health officials in all 50 states, many Tribes, U.S. territories, and hundreds of municipalities across the U.S. We also work with the CDC and other federal agencies; national and regional health official associations; national and regional health advocacy organizations; community planners and other government staff; food councils; anti-hunger advocates; community coalitions; and researchers. Communicating about complex legal topics in an accessible way is the core of our existing programming and an area in which we excel. We research the scope of authority for different levels and branches of government to address healthy food access, analyze policy options, identify the level of government best suited to act, draft sample language, examine existing federal, Tribal, state, territorial, and local laws, and address implementation and enforcement strategies with a focus on avoiding inequitable outcomes. We share this information through conversations, emails, formal memos, and meetings. We use this information to create educational materials, webinars, and trainings. We also are experienced in planning and facilitating learning communities, convenings, and collaborating with partners across agencies, sectors, and levels of government. We are ideally suited to carry out this Project and are excited at this opportunity to work with HRSA and the broader MCH field.
HHS’ Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS) website provides access to detailed descriptions of grants, loans, aggregated direct payments and other types of financial assistance awarded by the HHS Operating Divisions (OPDIVs) and the Office of the Secretary Staff Divisions (STAFFDIVs).