ANNUAL REPORT
2022
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Programs
Education
Advocacy
Research
Partnerships
We believe in a world where every mom and baby is healthy regardless of wealth, race, gender, or geography. This report reflects the worsening maternal and infant health crisis and the important work March of Dimes and our amazing community is doing to protect the health of every family across the country.
March of Dimes was there for both families and medical professionals with trusted education to ensure healthy pregnancies and babies, as well as implicit bias training to expose the impact systemic racism has on birth outcomes and maternal health. Families want information they can trust. Healthcare professionals need training that builds trust.
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In 2022, we supported people at every stage of pregnancy and those with a baby in the NICU with programs and services to help them prepare and get care no matter who they are or where they live. Our work is a direct reflection of all of our families’ needs.
Lauren LaRosa’s life began in a NICU, but it didn’t end there. She’s studying to become a NICU nurse under the same March of Dimes NICU Family Support® Program Coordinator who helped her family get through her preterm birth.
Lauren LaRosa
Through NICU Initiatives, we provided access to the support and education needed to improve the patient experience. This included the expansion of our services to NICU families and staff through 12 new NICU Family Support® (NFS) sites in hospitals with more than 70 sites across the country.
NICU Initiatives
We reached more than 52,000 families with babies in the NICU
Mobile units like this are excellent in terms of getting care to individuals that are marginalized.
Billie Hamilton-Powell, RN, CNM, MPAS
March of Dimes Mom & Baby Mobile Health Centers® provided over 4,100 patient visits, helping uninsured and under-insured women of childbearing age and families receive quality healthcare for themselves and their babies. We currently serve five communities, including in Arizona, Maryland, and Ohio. And we added a state-of-the-art 40-foot mobile clinic, which will be online soon to help women in Brooklyn and Queens in New York City.
Mobile health centers
With group care, you’re able to provide so much more for the patients and actually provide individual care because you get to know them better, you develop relationships with them.
Amanda Williams, CNM
Through Supportive Pregnancy Care® (SPC) March of Dimes provides tools, training, and support healthcare providers need to implement a sustainable model of group prenatal care in a way that works best for their practice and the pregnant people they serve.
Supportive Pregnancy Care
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We supported 45 SPC sites around the country with seven brand new sites
I felt like something wasn’t right—I voiced my concerns, and my concerns were dismissed.
Shannel Pearman
In 2022, the March of Dimes Professional Education Team trained more than 33,000 healthcare professionals and students with live and online training. Our implicit bias training made up 20,160 of these trainings to help us close the health equity gap. And more than 12,900 participants engaged in eight new maternal health training sessions and six enhanced sessions for NICU professionals.
For professionals
Trained 33,000 healthcare professionals and students
When moms like Jacque need information, we’re there for them. Our consumer education reached over nine million unique individuals. Our signature It Starts With Mom Live in May generated over 340,000 views, and also in 2022, we hosted 11 Healthy Moms, Strong Babies Webinars, reaching more than 335,000 people.
For families
Jacque felt disconnected to her baby in the NICU, Emma, who was born preterm. Once home, she still struggled to bond with her and showed signs of postpartum depression.
Jacque Morgan
To this day, they still can’t tell me why I had my baby early, and that’s a question that sort of haunted me. March of Dimes is the organization that’s continuing to look into answers to those questions.
Azizah Rowen
PeriStats, our website that provides free access to maternal and infant health-related data at the U.S., state, county, and city level, ensures that health professionals, researchers, medical librarians, policymakers, students, and the media can easily access this information. Data are updated throughout the year, and useful for multiple tasks, including fact-finding, health assessments, grant writing, policy development, lectures, and presentations.
Peristats
Our PeriStats webpage had 178,370 visits
We advocated with policymakers across the political spectrum to improve maternal and infant health policies so that every mom, baby, and family has equitable access to healthcare. Our fight is their fight for health equity.
Omari Maynard’s partner, Shamony’s complaints of pain and shortness of breath went ignored. She passed away two weeks after giving birth from a blood clot in her lungs.
Omari Maynard
We speak out for those who are unheard, like Shamony and Omari Maynard. March of Dimes’ Office of Government Affairs (OGA) led a successful aggressive maternal and child health policy agenda. At the federal level, we advocated for 65 bills to improve mom and baby health nationwide, with the passage and signing of 18 landmark laws.
127 state level bills were advocated for with 31 legislative victories
Through our advocacy efforts, the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act was included as part of an omnibus as an amendment and passed in December—and we continue to advocate for federal paid family leave. March of Dimes advocacy led to a nearly $3 billion increase in spending by federal and state governments on maternal and infant health programs for 2023.
March of Dimes helped pass the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act
Lisa Marie Mendoza
The company where Tara Marie was employed didn’t offer maternity leave, so two days after she gave birth, she returned to work.
It shouldn’t be that hard to get family leave.
Last year, March of Dimes addressed the multifaceted nature of the U.S. maternal and infant health crisis. By funding innovative research that spans disciplines, we’re expanding knowledge and developing tools and resources to save moms’ lives and help babies thrive. When the health of American families is in question, research is the answer.
At week two of her third pregnancy, Kelly was diagnosed with HELLP syndrome, a pregnancy complication that affects the blood and liver. Her daughter, Sidney was born 11 weeks too soon via Cesarean birth, and she was given surfactant, a March of Dimes-researched treatment, to help her lungs grow.
Kelly and Nick Cocco
Our research to find the causes and preventions of preterm birth continued at our five Prematurity Research Centers (PRCs) in the U.S. and London—so in the future moms and dads won’t have experiences like Kelly and Nick Cocco. Our newest PRC at The University of California, San Francisco led the field in the integration of machine learning and data science to understand and prevent preterm birth. Research at Imperial College London on glycans and glycobiology in cervicovaginal fluid shows promise as an early indicator of preterm birth.
Prematurity Research Centers
Diane and Aaron Dispo-Klein
After a miscarriage and numerous fertility treatments, Diane got pregnant with her first child in her forties. She was at high risk and constantly in fear of losing the baby. Suddenly, at 28 weeks and five days—during the global pandemic—her son was born by emergency Cesarean birth.
For parents like Diane and Aaron, the road to a healthy pregnancy can go in unforeseen directions. We invested more than $5.7 million among 42 awardees, including over $4.5 million to our PRCs in 2022 to speed the development of lifesaving diagnostics and treatments for moms and babies, and we published 82 articles in 62 unique journals with an overall impact factor score of over 570.
Grants
We’re huge supporters of March of Dimes and the research that goes into things like neural tube defects, like Tatum was born with, that may help to find what caused it.
Brandi and Derek Morris
Families like the Morrises experiencing birth defects or other complications need solutions. In September we launched our Innovation Fund, a venture philanthropy initiative that will use donated funds to invest in early-stage companies to address the most pressing maternal and infant health challenges to improve outcomes for moms and babies. We engaged with over 100 companies in the maternal and infant health space and completed one investment in 2022.
Funds
At week 2 of her third pregnancy, Kelly was diagnosed with HELLP syndrome, a pregnancy complication that affects the blood and liver. Her daughter, Sidney was born 11 weeks too soon via Cesarean birth, and she was given surfactant, a March of Dimes-researched treatment, to help her lungs grow.
It was scary with COVID because they only allowed one parent at a time. And since I wanted to breastfeed, that meant it was going to be me.
March of Dimes convened thousands of volunteers, corporations, and people to build initiatives, collaborate, and turn around the maternal and infant health crisis that families across the country face. Our cause is everyone’s cause.
We couldn’t fight for healthy moms and strong babies without our volunteers. With 6,000 new volunteers joining us last year, totaling 24,000, we made an impact together by: Providing 725 military families educational information and baby items through Mission: Healthy Baby®. Writing 7,000 Notes of Hope to families in the NICU or Notes of Gratitude to healthcare workers, for a total of 25,000 delivered since the program’s start. Raising $2.67 million dollars, thanks to our 2022 March for Babies National Service Partners, with 12,032 walkers participating.
Volunteer engagement
Funds raised at our special events support our fight to improve the health of moms and babies. Together with our amazing supporters, we raised over $29.5 million in our biggest activation of the year, March for Babies, and more than $21 million in our special events. 80% of that went toward our work to ensure that every family is healthy.
March for Babies and special events
More than 250 cross-sector organizations actively partner with us to tackle the maternal and infant health crisis using Collective Impact (CI), a model for solving complex social problems. Locally, nine CI communities across the country focus efforts on key drivers and root causes of infant mortality, preterm birth, maternal mortality, and severe maternal morbidity, and in 2022, reached more than 6,400 people.
Collective Impact
March of Dimes facilitates the Mom and Baby Action Network (M-BAN): a consortium of over 400 national, state, and local partners dedicated to addressing inequities in maternal and infant health through five shared strategies and to improve mom and baby health. As a leading M-BAN partner, we also build partnerships with local public and private organizations in communities across the U.S. to improve mom and baby health.
M-BAN
800 advocates engaged in a series of M-BAN learning webinars
Download our 2022 Annual Report PDF to learn more about our partnerships and alliances.