Our newest Nurturely team member took to the stage with Founder Emily Little, PhD and Program Director Aver Y. at the NIH headquarters to celebrate Nurturely's First Place Prize in the IMPROVE Initiative's Connecting the Community for Maternal Health Challenge! Welcome baby Zylo Orion ✨
Nurturely was my first baby. My dream was to start a community-based social change organization that uses research to understand and solve health equity challenges. This is a difficult task because the funding structures and resources for community-based orgs are not set up to support research, despite this being a critical tool for preventing disparities. Simultaneously, systems of academic institutions are not set up to address disparities from a community-based approach. 👎🏻 Thanks to the IMPROVE Initiative from Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), this is starting to change. Nurturely had the very special opportunity to participate in a national challenge: the IMPROVE Initiative’s Connecting the Community for Maternal Health Challenge, dedicated to building research infrastructure in community-based organizations, helping to set us up to be competitive for NIH and other funding mechanisms.📊 We are excited and grateful to announce that out of 8 national finalists in this challenge (of 95 participating teams), Nurturely was the recipient of the First Place Prize! 🏆 This week we traveled to the National Institutes of Health HQ to present our research update as the challenge winners. Together with Aver Y. , Nurturely Program Director, and alongside the many other talented participants of the IMPROVE Initiative, we shared an update on our implementation and effectiveness research testing infant carrying as a cultural intervention to reduce postpartum depression and increase lactation. But the best part was sharing the stage with our newest team member..... Zylo Orion Little Junod! 👶🏼 This sweet boy was born on September 2nd, full term and healthy under the committed and compassionate care of midwives and doulas (including the one and only Sabia Wade!) Zylo is committed to building a world where wellness for all babies and caregivers is a human right, and he’s already hard at work, sharing his message at NIH and beyond! He learned so much from this two-day research meeting and can't wait to expand our collaborations as we continue pursuing equity-centered effectiveness and implementation research 💪🏼 A huge thank you to the dedicated team at NIH, especially including Juanita J. Chinn, Ph.D., Nahida Chakhtoura, Maurice Davis, and Jennifer Wisdom, for stewarding this unique opportunity to bridge academia and the community, and for believing in Nurturely's vision of using preventative, culturally-rooted research to solve postpartum health disparities. 💯 #IMPROVEInitiative #MaternalHealthEquity #PerinatalHealth https://lnkd.in/edM54iVx