NYC Baby Basics Initiative Collaborating Partners
What to Expect Foundation
Medical and Health Research Association of New York City
Literacy Assistance Center
Primary Care Development Corporation
The What to Expect Foundation takes its name from the 26-million-copy best-selling What to Expect pregnancy and parenting series, and reaches out to the millions of families living in poverty who can neither afford nor, perhaps, read those books. The foundation has created the Baby Basics, a prenatal health literacy program that provides comprehensive information and health literacy support to expecting families in need and the healthcare providers who serve them. The foundation’s Baby Basics has reached over 100,000 families across the country. The NYC initiative will codify and evaluate a replicable Baby Basics prenatal literacy model that the foundation will disseminate nationally.
Medical and Health Research Association of New York City (MHRA) is a New York City focused not-for-profit organization that provides reproductive health services, including prenatal care, to over 23,000 patients through its MIC Women’s Health Services program, a network of eight centers located throughout NYC. MHRA offers a comprehensive approach to services that includes family support through its Bushwick Bright Start Healthy Families New York program, labor and delivery coaching through its Doula program, and nutrition services and food vouchers through its Neighborhood WIC program. Two of MHRA’s MIC Brooklyn sites and its other programs, coupled with MHRA’s leadership in rigorous, independent public health research and program evaluation, will enable the Baby Basic Initiative to carefully track outcomes, and evaluate and report on program effectiveness.
The Literacy Assistance Center is a not-for-profit organization that provides referral, training, information, and technical assistance services to hundreds of adult and youth literacy/ESOL programs in New York. The LAC citywide health literacy initiative is already addressing the myriad of general health issues facing adult learners. LAC will create a prenatal health literacy curriculum and conduct the training for the Baby Basics Initiative.
The Primary Care Development Corporation expands and enhances access to primary care in underserved communities by building and providing operational and clinical technical assistance programs for healthcare providers. PCDC helps organizations make principled, sustainable, and reproducible changes. This initiative builds on PCDC’s recent prenatal initiative focusing on creating structural change within provider networks and calls upon their strength in program building and codification. For the purposes of this initiative, PCDC will provide project management services by overseeing and coordinating the planning, implementation, and evaluation of the project and supporting communication among project partners.