How the Church of Jesus Christ is helping newborns live
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MyBaby4Me is a new initiative to help reduce the number of infant deaths in two Black communities in Tennessee through the joint efforts of the NAACP and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The two organizations have been working together in recent years to find ways to help Black communities in a number of ways, but when a Latter-day Saint leader sat down with community leaders in Memphis, infant mortality jumped to the top of the list, according to the Church News.
“It disturbs me that (we) are sitting in a zip-code that has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the country,” Vickie Terry, executive director of the Memphis Branch of the NAACP, told Elder Michael V. Beheshti, then an Area Seventy in the church’s North America Southeast Area and a practicing physician.
Elder Beheshti found a program to model after, Moms2B, that had helped reduce infant mortality rates in Weinland Park, Ohio, from 15 per 1,000 births to 3 per 1,000 births, which is below the national average of 5.6 per 1,000.
Moms2B accepts women at any stage of pregnancy and supports them through a newborn’s first year. The NAACP and the Church of Jesus Christ created MyBaby4Me Memphis on that model.
In its first month, MyBaby4Me Memphis served more than 30 high-risk mothers, providing them with more than 700 meals, 600 grocery bags and 500 gift cards for gasoline and other necessities. Volunteers provided over 1,000 rides to the expectant or new mothers. So far, 18 healthy babies have been delivered.
In February, the church launched a second initiative, MyBaby4Me Nashville, with Catholic Charities of Nashville.
Last month, MyBaby4Me Memphis received a $790,000 grant from the Tennessee Strong Families Grant Program to continue serving the underserved maternal and infant populations in Memphis.
Read more at the Church News.
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