CLEVELAND, Ohio – Kindness comes in many forms. It doesn’t come as early (or as often) as it should for many. Yet, protection and care for the community’s most vulnerable is perhaps the greatest kindness of all.
Two Black women are doing all in their power to create change in the community for Black infants and their mothers, with the aim of giving them the best possible shot at surviving and thriving.
If you’ve spent any time reading this column over the last year, you know that helping the most vulnerable of us survive and thrive is perhaps the biggest kindness of all.
A Cleveland State University interdisciplinary research initiative called Survive and Thrive has been partnering with Birthing Beautiful Communities, a local nonprofit founded in 2014 for the express purpose of reducing Black infant and maternal deaths. Their initiatives are changing and saving lives.
In Ohio, Black women are more than five times as likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than the state average, according to a recent JAMA study.
In 2020, nearly 75% of the babies in Cleveland who died before they turned one were Black. Tasked to reduce infant and maternal mortality, the partnership was awarded grant funding from the Ohio Third Frontier (via the Ohio Department of Higher Education, ODHE) a few years ago to help the partnership in the development of a mobile app called “Thrive.” Heather Rice, Ph.D., assistant professor at Cleveland State University’s School of Nursing (housed in CSU’s College of Health), served as principal investigator for the Survive and Thrive team. Her work has been integral in keeping the funding and stabilization of the team’s collective efforts level.
App information includes “everything from a breastfeeding tool, kick counter, developmental milestones tracker, vital signs tracker and support ticket that allows mothers to request assistance with transportation and support services.”
New additions will focus on stress reduction, mindfulness and breathing strategies.
The app was developed in concert with Ohio tech company Big Kitty Labs, with a range of resources from workforce development training and job placement services, to “emotional support opportunities” for both mothers and fathers.
The Thrive app scores and synthesizes risks by category, creating an intuitively based, individual “perinatal pathway” for parents to follow.
“With my background as a pediatric nurse practitioner, I am passionate about how research can impact the work being done around infant and maternal mortality,” Rice said in an interview in 2021.
Being able to coalesce social and clinical data with the team and Birthing Beautiful Communities to uplift and support mothers and families has been a personal mission for her.