Dear friends,
For many communities of women, birthing people, families, and maternity care providers, this past year was a trying one. The devastating ripple effects of the overturning of Roe v. Wade continue to reverberate across the United States, and the dire impact of the COVID pandemic on pregnant people is underscored by increased maternal mortality rates. It is evident that achieving lasting progress on maternal health remains a global challenge.
As always, it is the resilience, care, and commitment of our grantee partners and so many others that gives us hope and inspires us.
This past year, I took inspiration from these partners to dedicate time reflecting on Every Mother Counts’ impact since our founding. As you will read in this report, in 2023 we engaged in a long-overdue strategic planning process. This period of reflection and analysis has helped to reignite the fire that led me to this work; our focus is clear and our path forward is charted.
What is most clear now is that our mission to ensure equitable access to safe and respectful maternity care for all is as relevant as ever, and that Every Mother Counts has played a significant role in elevating this issue and amplifying solutions since 2010. Not only are fewer mothers dying in pregnancy and childbirth, but there is a conversation taking place about maternal health that was absent a decade ago. Stories of preventable maternal deaths and near-misses are making headlines, inspiring policymakers and their legislatures to take action.
So, in this reflective moment, I choose optimism. I am delighted to share some of the highlights of EMC’s work and the efforts of our unstoppable grantee partners from the past year with you.
As always, we would not be able to do our work without your dedication and support.
Thank you for being a part of our journey.
With gratitude,
Christy Turlington Burns
Founder & President, Every Mother Counts
In the first half of 2023, EMC worked with a team from Boston Consulting Group on an organizational strategic review and planning process with the goal of maximizing our impact for the near and long term. This exercise had been considered for 2020 to coincide with EMC’s 10th anniversary but had to be postponed because of the pandemic. This process resulted in a three-to-five-year strategy for EMC and set out milestones for the next decade to help us achieve the highest impact possible.
Over the course of six months, consultants conducted a landscape analysis of the maternal health space and players, interviewed internal and external stakeholders, and evaluated EMC’s comparative strengths.
Coming out of the strategic planning process, EMC formalized our programmatic focus on two core topics: community-based care and workforce development. These focus areas were selected because of their relevance to the communities in which we work, both in the U.S. and globally. We also reaffirmed our commitment to working through three mutually reinforcing programmatic levers: awareness raising, grantmaking, and policy and advocacy. Some of the key considerations for each of these arms of our work are discussed later in this report.
The strategic review and planning process helped chart immediate- and long-term priorities for EMC. We spent the second half of 2023 focused on hiring leadership for our Impact and Development teams, further refining criteria to inform decisions across each arm of our work, and setting out an implementation roadmap for 2024 and beyond.
In 2023, our work was guided by our mission to make pregnancy and childbirth safe, respectful, and equitable for everyone, everywhere. Our achievements are measurable and extensive.
Here are some highlights.
A clear finding in our strategic planning work was that Every Mother Counts’ focus on raising awareness about the maternal health crisis is a true strength. It was noted that this component of our work, which includes our storytelling, sets us apart from our peers and helps us reach a broad audience.
Our efforts to amplify the stories of women and birthing people personalizes statistics and makes alarming data points relatable. We educate through events and campaigns and engage through our running program. These activities are core to what we do and critical to our success building a motivated community of supporters and advocates.
The 20-minute film spotlights Arkansas, the state with the highest maternal mortality rate across the United States. GBA: Arkansas vividly paints a picture of the reality of the postpartum experience, which extends through a full year following the birth of a child. More than half of all maternal deaths take place during the postpartum period, yet this stage of pregnancy is often overlooked. The film follows three mothers, Ashleigh, Tynesha, and Wensie, as they grapple with mental health concerns, lack of paid leave, and other challenges in the days, weeks, and months following birth, highlighting key gaps in the current landscape of postpartum care. The film underscores the essential role of community-based support, especially within historically marginalized communities.
Alongside the film, EMC released a companion resource to drive action, the “Giving Birth in America: Arkansas Screening and Advocacy Guide”. The film and companion guide opened the door to maternal health advocacy and storytelling opportunities in Arkansas and across the U.S.
Using a teaser of the film, we curated a conversation about maternal health at SXSW in Austin, Texas in March. Following the film’s launch in April, we featured a discussion about maternal health at the Soiree Women’s Leadership Forum in Little Rock, Arkansas. And in May, our Impact team colleagues used the film to inform an advocacy learning session at the Arkansas Maternal Health Community Hackathon. The film was showcased at the Bentonville Film Festival in June and was screened as part of the Women Deliver film festival in Kigali, Rwanda in July. We rounded out the year screening the film in December in New York City. At each opportunity, we paired screenings with panel conversations that featured maternal health experts and advocates and shared “Take Action” cards to help audiences to call on policymakers to support key maternal health legislation, including Medicaid extension through a full year postpartum.
Since our inception, Every Mother Counts has invested in locally led solutions that are filling gaps in underserved and historically marginalized communities experiencing poor maternal health outcomes. One of the core findings of the strategic planning work we underwent this year was that Every Mother Counts’ grantmaking work is transformative for small community-based organizations, and that our work could be even more impactful if we honed our focus areas, geographies, and audiences.
Following the strategic planning process, and in recognition of the need to accelerate key solutions to address a deepening maternal health crisis, we refined our focus to support the provision of community-based care and growing, strengthening, and diversifying the maternity care workforce. Through our grantmaking, we aim to address disparities in maternal health outcomes and experiences by expanding the pipeline of providers and ensuring more mothers and birthing people have access to care that is safe, respectful, and equitable to ultimately address disparities in maternal health outcomes.
In 2023, Every Mother Counts invested nearly $4.2 million in 48 organizations and programs across nine core countries and additional one-time emergency grants.
Collectively, our grantees reached 177,414 people with comprehensive maternal and reproductive healthcare and support.
Our grantees strengthened 226 health facilities, trained 10,575 providers in the healthcare sector (including community-based doulas, professional midwives, and traditional birth attendants), and ensured 13,384 births were attended by a skilled provider.
Centering community-led solutions is core to Every Mother Counts’ mission. Through our General Operating Support grants, we invest in our grantee partners’ missions, rather than specific projects or programs. By providing the flexibility grantees need to decide how to best utilize funding to advance their work, grantees are supported to build more sustainable initiatives and organizations.
In 2023, we continued to invest in community-based organizations at the forefront of advancing safe, respectful, and equitable maternity care. As a key strategy to strengthen and deepen relationships with grantee partners, we visit organizations in our portfolio to learn more about their work firsthand, including challenges and opportunities, and to see and experience the impact they are making in their communities directly.
At Every Mother Counts, we’re committed to continuous learning about how to best support and accelerate the impact of community-based organizations implementing innovative solutions to advance maternal health. In 2023, we piloted our new Impact Scaler model of funding to grow and scale existing initiatives that have demonstrated significant improvements in maternal health. Through these grants, in partnership with our core grantee partners, we support evidence-based initiatives with the resources they need to scale their work and impact.
As we continue to develop and evolve our Impact Scaler model of funding in the coming years, we plan to work closely with our grantee partners to build robust partnerships that support the complex journey to scale.
In 2023, unprecedented climate-related emergencies and humanitarian crises impacted the health and well-being of communities globally, disproportionately affecting women and children. Every Mother Counts issued emergency grants to support the provision of maternity care, along with emergency relief needs, through timely and coordinated response efforts in Ukraine, Gaza, and Hawaii. For example, when wildfires ravaged Maui in August 2023, EMC supported the Healthy Mothers Healthy Babies Coalition of Hawaii to set up a makeshift clinic and transport their mobile unit to provide immediate access to critical medical supplies and enable midwives and birth workers to reach the most affected communities.
EMC’s policy and advocacy arm complements our work at the community level by advancing broader, system-wide solutions. We support policymakers and maternal health advocates in the United States at the federal and state levels who are pushing for critical legislative changes that would meaningfully impact outcomes and experiences of care for pregnant people in this country.
The strategic planning process identified that EMC could play an important role in educating policymakers about critical maternal health issues, and that we could have a stronger role to play in equipping community-based partners with tools to advance grassroots advocacy–activities that will evolve in the years to come.
In 2023, Every Mother Counts continued to support the development and passage of federal legislation and policies in the United States to improve maternal health outcomes, experiences of care, and address inequities.
Last year, we endorsed and advocated for the Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act (Momnibus) — a package of 13 bills designed to comprehensively address the maternal health crisis in the U.S. through historic and essential investments in community-based and equity-focused maternal health policies, programs, and providers—and the reintroduction of the Maximizing Outcomes for Moms through Medicaid Improvement and Enhancement of Services (MOMMIES) Act that would extend Medicaid through 12 months postpartum nationwide.
Throughout the year, we encouraged our community to make their voices heard in support of quality, respectful, and equitable maternity care for all.
The series was designed for and open to all Medicaid stakeholders and partners who wanted an evidence-based roadmap to reducing perinatal disparities and improving birth equity. Each session featured expert speakers from across the country and was designed to amplify the voices and experiences of community-based perinatal support providers, including several EMC grantee partners, ensuring they were shaping solutions. The more than 1,000 series registrants included representatives from Medicaid health plans, state Medicaid agencies, federal agencies, community-based organizations, provider groups, and national and state-based professional, advocacy, and funder organizations, as well as community-based doulas and perinatal community health workers.
In October 2023, EMC and IMI published a final report summarizing high-level learnings from the series.
In May 2023, EMC published the article “Every Mother Counts: listening to mothers to transform maternity care” in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology’s Labor supplement. The article highlights the collective work and vision of Every Mother Counts and emphasizes how listening to mothers and birthing people is essential to advancing maternal health and birth equity.
While 2023 was a year of reflection and analysis for Every Mother Counts, 2024 promises to be a year of implementation! We are looking forward to putting our strategic plan into action. Though we know implementation will be challenging and will entail pivots and adjustments, we are excited about the prospect of testing our refined approach and building out new methods for measuring impact.
While our strategic approach will continue to evolve, our core mission remains, as always, to work toward a world where pregnancy and childbirth is safe, respectful, and equitable for everyone, everywhere. To ensure that all people can access quality maternity care. To affirm that maternal health truly is a human right.
As we look to 2024 – a pivotal election year in more than 60 countries, including many where EMC has grantee partners — we believe our mission will be more important than ever. We will need your continued support to make strides toward achieving our mission. Thank you for your trust in our work and for your partnership, always.
