Eight years after its founding, the mission of First Year Cleveland remains unchanged: to reduce the infant mortality rate in Cuyahoga County. But the community organization’s strategy for addressing the problem has evolved in an important, and hopefully, more impactful way.
“We’re really shifting the narrative. Healthcare is not the solution to infant mortality, but it has been part of the problem. Now we’re looking at the impact of someone’s environment on the course of their life and on their health outcomes,” says First Year Cleveland Executive Director Angela Newman-White. “And this has given us the opportunity to shift from an accountability lens that focuses on the system, rather than the individual.”
Though FYC does not provide direct services on its own, it does provide funding, support and training to local organizations and care providers whose work aims to address infant and maternal health, and the social determinants that impact health outcomes, particularly within the Black community. Though the county’s infant mortality rate has shown improvement in the last decade, the rate for Black babies remains twice that of white babies.
FYC is housed at CWRU’s Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel School for Applied Social Sciences, which serves as the fiscal agent for FYC. Financial support for FYC is provided by Ohio Department of Medicaid, Cuyahoga County, the City of Cleveland, Cleveland City Council, the Cleveland Foundation, the Mt. Sinai Health Care Foundation, the George Gund Foundation, St. Luke’s Foundation, and the Cleveland Housing Network.
Newman-White, who joined FYC in January 2023, was the impetus for the organization’s shift in approach. Newman-White has spent her entire 20-year career in public health, first serving as a case manager for the Cleveland Department of Health’s MomsFirst program (which is an FYC grantee-partner) and working her way up to serving as Grant Supervisor at the Cuyahoga County Board of Health. Her experiences shaped her vision of how FYC could have a greater impact on maternal and infant health, and more broadly, the Black community.
Under Newman-White’s leadership, FYC is taking a closer look at opportunities to enhance current programs and service delivery models and to address barriers such as institutional and structural racism. The organization also has established a public policy committee to develop a local and statewide policy agenda. “We have to make sure that we address the risk factors that are essentially symptoms of a larger upstream deficiency,” she says. “Changing policy is where the sustainable change lies.”
In 2023, FYC aligned its work to fall under three primary roles: connector, protector and activator. In its work as a connector, FYC rebranded its website, launched a quarterly newsletter and a Community Advisory Committee, provided training for perinatal healthcare workers, invested $285,000 in a community program for infant loss, and positioned itself with nine partner organizations to support more than 3,200 women by June 2024, among other accomplishments. As a protector, FYC worked to build on the strengths and assets of Black communities by hosting community listening sessions, providing free mental health therapeutic support and collecting and donating items for mothers and babies. Finally, as an activator, FYC submitted testimony to the state legislature on behalf of five families, wrote op-eds in support of family policies, launched a policy committee and held the first annual state-wide Infant Vitality Advocacy Day, among other advocacy work.
Newman-White is optimistic about the foundational work she and FYC laid last year and looks forward to the year ahead. She says that everyone can be a part of the solution to help mothers and babies thrive.
“We want to empower people to be the change they want to see. We want to shift the power to the community,” Newman-White says. “You don’t have to work with pregnant women to be a part of the solution. You can practice mindfulness when you’re engaging with someone in a different background than you. You can use your voice when you vote. You can just work to practice empathy and compassion—because that’s not just helpful to you, it’s helpful to everyone.”
Visit First Year Cleveland online to learn more about how you can support infant vitality and advancing maternal health.