Starting Early

👋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.

This week, we highlight World Maternal Mental Health Day, drawing attention to the essential mental health concerns women face. The COVID-19  pandemic has taken a disproportionate toll on women — with working moms bearing the brunt of home-schooling and childcare, leading to over 2 million women leaving the workforce.

Looking ahead to Mother’s Day on Sunday 🌷, we believe it is vital to lift the work of women and honor the work of mothers. We recognize that when we invest in women and girls, we are investing in the people who invest in everyone else.

Please read on and we invite you to click through the links to go deeper.

You received this inaugural edition of the Burke Foundation’s newsletter, Starting Early, because of your interest in helping all children get the strong start they need to reach their full potential in life.

Like you, we work “upstream” on maternal and infant health and early childhood development — tackling root causes to prevent issues from becoming problems; stopping problems before they become crises.

Every other week, we’ll provide highlights of new reports, useful news, engaging interviews with people doing important work in the field, and interesting takes on issues that matter.

Our promise to you: We’ll keep Starting Early lively and short – with plenty of links so you explore what you want, when you want.