Reducing Racial Disparities
addressing Extreme Prematurity
Eliminating Sleep-Related Deaths
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Our Leadership
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Every baby born in Cuyahoga County will celebrate a first birthday. That’s our vision at First Year Cleveland (FYC) and the focus of our work.
For more than five decades, Cuyahoga County has had one of the highest infant mortality rates in the country, which means many babies don’t reach age one. At FYC, we’re helping mobilize the community around this issue through key partnerships and a strategy to reduce infant deaths.
Our three-year strategic planning process began in 2017 and included specific action steps that our community can take to reduce infant deaths. Our community identified the major factors contributing to infant deaths, which led us to defining three key priority areas for our work.
Focusing on these priorities will help us gather meaningful data, align programs and coordinate systems to decrease infant deaths, particularly among African American babies, with urgency, accountability and sustainability.
In year two (2018-19), we have been seeking outside funding to support our efforts, developing an integrated model of community leaders, hosting educational conferences and publishing results. We are also leading efforts for Safe Sleep activities, CenteringPregnancy and additional programming.
FYC had the opportunity to share our model at the national level in 2018 at the Grantmakers in Health National Conference and will be presenting FYC work at the March of Dimes National Conference this summer. We continue to strive for sustainability and have been training others on how to replicate FYC's work around the country. We want to scale up our program interventions, monitor the data and continue to make the public aware of the myriad ways of ensuring a healthy pregnancy and delivery, as well as ongoing support and the resources available to help raise a healthy baby.
Measuring results and coordinating data collection with our partners will help FYC develop key metrics to advance our efforts. The data we collect and the results we garner from this data will allow us to:
To learn more about our goals and plans for First Year Cleveland, download a full copy of our strategic plan and our mobilization efforts.
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