Author: the Burke Foundation

👋 Welcome to Starting Early. Every other week, we spotlight new reports, useful news, engaging interviews with people doing important work in the field, and interesting takes on issues that matter.

Last spring, Burke staff read about a class taught by Professor Heather Howard at Princeton that empowers undergraduates to explore inequities in New Jersey’s healthcare system and propose policy solutions. Turquoise Brewington, a brilliant junior in the class, was evaluating how to improve outcomes for Black mothers by expanding Medicaid coverage for home births and midwives. Now we welcome Turquoise as our maternal infant health intern.

We’re also pleased to report that a crucial policy recommendation was realized last week when New Jersey became only the second state to expand Medicaid coverage for 365 days postpartum.

👋Welcome to Starting Early. Every other week, we spotlight new reports, useful news, engaging interviews with people doing important work in the field, and interesting takes on issues that matter.

Over the past 3 years, we’ve worked very closely with the New Jersey Department of Children and Families (DCF) to prevent childhood trauma and heal those affected by it. Our partner, Commissioner Christine Beyer, is a leader in upstream work to address adverse outcomes.

This week we take you behind the scenes of DCF to learn more about the Commissioner’s aspirations for the future of child welfare.

And we’re proud to announce that our executive director, Atiya Weiss, will be a 2021 Aspen Institute Ascend Fellow, joining a group of visionary leaders committed to reinventing systems and advancing two-generation solutions that create pathways to economic mobility for families and children.

👋 Welcome to Starting Early. Every other week, we spotlight new reports, useful news, engaging interviews with people doing important work in the field, and interesting takes on issues that matter.

We are honored to sit down this week with Dr. Damali Campbell. She is a physician in OB/GYN and Addiction Medicine at University Hospital in Newark – and a champion for Black women’s health. She filled us in on her team’s work at one of the largest safety net hospitals in the state, and talked about expanding CenteringPregnancy, a transformative health care model that aims to reach 50 new clinical sites in the next 5 years.

👋Welcome to Starting Early. Every other week, we spotlight new reports, useful news, and engaging interviews with people doing important work in the field, and interesting takes on issues that matter.

At the Burke Foundation, we are deeply concerned about America’s maternal mortality crisis. Women of color are two to three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white women. To address these racial disparities, we are exploring expanding the community-birthing workforce — doulas, peer breastfeeding counselors, and community health workers, for example — to deliver enhanced perinatal care to women and families and create new employment opportunities.

👋Welcome to Starting Early. Every other week, we spotlight new reports, useful news, and engaging interviews with people doing important work in the field, and interesting takes on issues that matter.

Through our work over the past four years, we at the Burke Foundation have learned about and researched how some of society’s greatest challenges — including addiction, homelessness, and poor mental health — have their roots in the earliest years of a person’s life.

This knowledge inspires our grantmaking. In this edition of Starting Early, we highlight several of Burke’s grantee partners and their far-reaching impacts on children and families in New Jersey and across the country.

👋 Welcome to Starting Early. Every other week, we spotlight new reports, useful news, and engaging interviews with people doing important work in the field, and interesting takes on issues that matter.

As we shared in our recent conversation with Dr. Nadine Burke Harris and Dave Ellis, traumatic events such as experiencing parental separation, violence, abuse or neglect, and toxic relationships during childhood can create invisible scars, often damaging mental health well into adulthood. Dr. Burke Harris, California’s first surgeon general, has an audacious goal: to cut adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and toxic stress in half within one generation.

We share Dr.

👋 Welcome to Starting Early. Every other week, we spotlight new reports, useful news, engaging interviews with people doing important work in the field, and interesting takes on issues that matter.

In our last issue, we connected ACEs (Adverse Childhood Experiences) and toxic stress as root causes of some of the most harmful and expensive societal and health challenges.   

This week, we highlight early relational health, an antidote to the damaging effects of trauma: buffering adversity through positive, nurturing relationships can advance a young child’s health, well-being, and resilience.

We spoke with a thoughtful early childhood expert and Turrell Fund trustee Dr.

👋Welcome to the third edition of Starting Early. Every other week, we spotlight new reports, useful news, engaging interviews with people doing important work in the field, and interesting takes on issues that matter.

• We work “upstream” on maternal and infant health and early childhood development — tackling root causes to prevent issuesfrom becoming problems; stopping problems before they become crises.

This week we discuss Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs), a term that is relatively new to our mainstream vocabulary and is having a powerful impact on public health discussions and policymaking.

The basic idea is that early trauma and adversity that young children experience can lead to long-term health problems.