Building Momentum for Change: 2025 Highlights and the Road Ahead
For a while now our Maternal and Child Health (MCH) Team has been a supporter of the New Orleans Maternal and Child Health Coalition, and in 2025 we were excited to support its expansion from a local coalition to a statewide one! As you’ll see reflected here, this past year a lot of our MCH work has been to help the Louisiana Maternal and Child Health Coalition (MCHC) grow their reach and continue incubating their efforts during this year full of collaboration, learning, and growth. But that’s not all we did, check out the rest of the blog to see the major successes we’re celebrating this year!
If you follow our MCH Team you’ll know that we’ve been proud to partner with Birthmark for years, and this past year, as representatives of the MCHC, we were excited to participate in Birthmark’s Black Birth Matters (BBM) regional events. One of our favorite BBM events took place in Lafayette in October 2025, and we see that event as a big win. Over 50 participants came out, and we were able to connect with birthworkers and strengthen relationships with MCH leaders thoughout the state of Louisiana, leading to an increase in MCHC membership.
The next exciting development has been the expansion of the MCHC’s research and educational efforts. This year the MCHC produced issue briefs that covered topics pertinent to current MCH-related policy events in Louisiana, developed a set of evidence-based recommendations for evaluating statewide doula programs, and even garnered the attention of prestigious media outlets such The Advocate, which published an op-ed discussing care for birthing families from a longstanding MCHC Advisory Board member, Dr. Melissa Goldin Evans, a research scientist at Tulane University’s Mary Amelia Center.
This year we’ve also formalized a new partnership with the Louisiana Coalition for Reproductive Freedom (LCRF), in an effort to dismantle silos across the reproductive and maternal health and justice spectrum in Louisiana. Some core reproductive justice issues exist at the intersection of maternal health and justice — such as bodily autonomy — and in order to identify the most pertinent issues and key strategies to address them, we have hosted meetings for our respective memberships to explore the overlap between our sectors. Major shout out to Victoria Coy, LCRF’s Executive Director, for your valuable expertise in activation, mutual aid movements, and membership resource building, as well as your strong collaborative spirit.
One of the key elements of the success of this work has been deepening partnerships with MCH leaders like Robin Gruenfeld, who has supported the Coalition on a learning journey that integrates collective impact and results-based thinking. Using a data-driven approach, we are working toward an updated common agenda for change for the Coalition. At this moment in our political and social landscape in Louisiana, we are being intentional about co-creating a Common Agenda that reflects leadership and expertise in the expansive maternal and child health community of activists, birth workers, organizers, academics, people with lived experience, and public health practitioners. The Coalition has invited some of its existing members to take on a leadership role in responding to changing needs of the communities we serve, and we also formed a Convening Team through self-nominations. We are excited to deepen the work with this team to strengthen the impact and the value of our collaborative work and we look forward to the impact this evolving framework will create and to the improved outcomes we can achieve together.
Up until now we’ve spoken a lot about our successes and exciting new developments, but we also want to share one key lesson our Team learned this year, and that’s the importance of flexibility.
After a year of diving into collaborative work, we’ve realized that being flexible has served us well! While previously we worked in conjunction with each other, this year the policy advocacy group MAMA Plus Health has grown an expanded, and has become established itself as a separate entity from the MCH Coalition. This has proven to be a beautiful opportunity that has allowed us to fully focus the MCHC on coalition building and that has given us the space to regroup and devise a plan to gather data to lead to the establishment of concrete goals. Although we have separated, we still find ways to partner and work together. For example, we continue to support the legislative advocacy movement led by MAMA Plus with materials like our Legislative Scorecards that provide scores for Louisiana legislators based on their support of the key four focus areas in the Mama+ Health Policy agenda: social determinants of health, mental health, reproductive justice, and criminal justice.
Our MCH team is eager to continue building meaningful partnerships between organizations like MCHC and Mama Plus with birthworkers and community leaders across Louisiana. We are excited by the momentum that is building to advocate for maternal and child health and strengthen support for families throughout the state, and we hope you all will join us in this work!