The Saving Our Babies Project intentionally centers Black women and their communities as the authorities on the issues that most impact their lives. Our engagement process, partners, and solutions reflect this commitment, and is central to our work to uncover solutions that address and resolve the low birthweight, infant mortality disparity, and maternal mortality burden that local African American families face.

Our strategies and solutions support community capacity by engaging and investing in community-based knowledge, leadership, and infrastructure. We intentionally invest in and partner deeply with existing community-based efforts and organizations. Our collaborative approach brings health systems, Black women-led entities, community organizations, and residents in communities most impacted together to identify, co-create, and implement community-driven solutions.

Care coordination is a best practice approach to organizing patient care and sharing information among all parties involved on the care team to achieve better health outcomes. Our change strategy included the creation and launch of ConnectRx Wisconsin, a care coordination system that, through innovative technology, goes one step further to connect both clinical and trusted, non-clinical community providers who work together to support patients' health, social, economic, mental health, and other resource needs. A community-based workforce of community health workers and Doulas provides additional assistance to highest risk patients, ensuring they are supported throughout their pregnancy and birthing journey. We implemented this solution in direct response to feedback from Black women and families who revealed that though Dane County’s ecosystem of health and community resources is rich and extensive, navigating and accessing services is fragmented and difficult. Care coordination is one solution among many that we believe will show promise in reducing racial birth disparities.

We know that in order to address and eliminate racial birth disparities impacting Black women, babies and families, we must confront and address bias in healthcare and other institutions. The Saving Our Babies project names racism and bias as major public health threats, and actively works to enact practices, strategies, approaches, and institutional accountability to uproot bias as a barrier.