About Us

The Blue Ridge Health District, Birth Sisters of Charlottesville, a doula collective supporting Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) mothers, and the Virginia State Title V Director is one of seven teams selected nationally for a two-year initiative through CityMatCH Alignment for Action Learning Collaborative (AAC), which began in March 2021. This cooperative project team is charged with developing local action plans to address racial disparity in maternal health and birth outcomes.

The team’s efforts, supported by CityMatCH with technical assistance and capacity building, include examining Title V needs assessments and cross-referencing them with local-level data and feedback from community members, and working together with the State Title V Director to improve health outcomes surrounding these priority areas from the Virginia State Action Plan.

The State Title V-MCH Director and the collaborative team plan to improve health outcomes surrounding these priority areas from the Virginia State Action Plan:

State Priority 4: Maternal and Infant Mortality Disparity: Eliminate the racial disparity in maternal and infant mortality rates by 2025.

State Priority 6: Racism: Explore and eliminate drivers of structural and institutional racism within programs, policies, and practices to improve maternal and child health.

In February 2021, Virginia became the first southern state to declare racism a public health crisis. State and local health maternal and infant health disparities mirror national trends and show that racism makes an alarming impact on health outcomes for Black mothers and babies in the Blue Ridge Health District.

• Black women are more than twice as likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than white women in Virginia.
• In the Blue Ridge Health District, the 5-year average infant mortality rate for black babies was 7.6 (per 1000 live births) compared to 4.9 for white babies from 2016 to 2020.
• One-third of the pregnant women and new mothers who died in 2020 were Black, though Black Americans make up just over 13 percent of the population. Their mortality rate was nearly three times that of white women, according to a report from the National Center for Health Statistics.

This technical assistance from City MatCH, with direction from the Title V Maternal Child Health needs assessments will help the coalition effectively develop projects that involve local agencies and providers and input of mothers and families.

There is much work to be done in the equity space. This collaborative provides the opportunity to define roles, redefine power and shape local efforts to inform state level efforts (i.e. doula reimbursement, maternal mortality review) and drive the development of a new vision for collective action locally. It will also resource and elevate the voices of black families and strengthen community networks that support women in feeling safe and in control of their maternal journey.