Nurture KC's May 2024 Update

May 2024 Update

Last December I nervously hit the send button, submitting our grant application for the five-year renewal of Healthy Start, a federal program that is the flagship of Nurture KC. Fast forward to late April and I can gratefully report that Healthy Start will remain the backbone of our efforts to reduce infant and maternal mortality in Kansas City.

The latest award marks nearly three decades of Healthy Start in Kansas City. Thousands of Kansas City families have been the recipients of the wrap around care, services and resources designed to improve their lives and future generations. With each grant iteration, there are changes to improve care delivery to better meet the needs of families. The 2024-2029 grant cycle is no exception. While the community health worker model continues in the next cycle, there are additional components that must be implemented as well. A community consortium, comprised of Healthy Start parents, community members and interested organizations will be established with the goal of addressing key social determinants of health that are barriers to healthy pregnancies and families. The consortium complements the direct service we provide through case management, applying broad strategies for all of Kansas City. The other component is to provide a curriculum of parenting education to 250 parents outside of Healthy Start case management to impact a broad audience.

While this grant expands our responsibilities and deliverables, I am confident that the Nurture KC team is up to the task as we evolve to meet the needs of families. The majority of Healthy Start grantees are state/local government health departments, universities or hospital systems. Nurture KC is an outlier as a small, independent nonprofit. Our track record over the decades and willingness to adapt makes me hopeful that this will be our most impactful five years yet!

Tracy Russell

Executive Director, Nurture KC

Introducing our new Community Engagement Director

As mentioned in the above column, our Healthy Start program is expanding with more deliverables moving forward in this next grant cycle. We are thrilled to welcome Ahkeya Howard in this role. She joins us at our corporate headquarters after being our Lead Community Health Worker for Healthy Start at Swope. You can read Ahkeya's bio on our web site to learn more.

Check out our Annual Report

Improving on our core services year-after-year has become a given for Nurture KC. If you haven't already, please review our 2023 Annual Report to see how we help support families and our community through our key programs and services, including Healthy Start, Mid America Immunization Coalition (MAIC), Fetal Infant Mortality Review Commitee (FIMR), Promise 1000 and advocacy in public policy. Our advocacy efforts help ensure that the families we support are represented on issues that impact their health and well-being.

The report also reviews our financials (income by funder and expenses), highlights our organizational partners and Board of Directors, includes an annual overview from our leader, and shows how to follow us on social media and how Nurture KC is involved in our community (through civic and legislative engagement, as a key source for media, making notable speeches and presentations, producing a podcast and committees we serve on).

The report is located on nurturekc.org under our "News and Events" tab on the top navigation of our home page. We hope you will share with your networks as well, as it's quite impressive to see all of the work we do in one spot and how many people we help.

Five K.C. hospitals receive 'Nurturing Safe Sleep Champion' certification

We are proud to announce that five area hospitals have been awarded Nurturing Safe Sleep Champion status for adopting a safe sleep policy for babies, training staff accordingly and providing corresponding education to parents. Ultimately, this certification saves newborns’ lives.

The local hospitals that have been certified over the past two years include:

AdventHealth South Overland Park
Liberty Hospital
North Kansas City Hospital
Providence Medical Center
University Health System (Hospital Hill and Lakewood locations)

Nurture KC’s initiative started in 2022 because only two area hospitals, Children’s Mercy and University Health, had safe sleep credentials. Those credentials are from Cribs for Kids, the national model on this type of training and the program Nurture KC implemented with local hospitals.

You can read the full news release here from Nurture KC.