National Healthy Mothers Healthy Babies Coalition

Happy Mother’s Day! I’m lucky enough to get to spend today with my mom. She’s in town for some wedding planning stuff, so we’re enjoying our first Mother’s Day together in years. While I have great memories of all of the amazing things my mom has done for me, some of the most important things that she did happened before I can remember. Good mothering is most essential in the first few years of life, and that’s why the National Healthy Mothers Healthy Babies Coalition was started as a response to the US Surgeon General’s conference on infant mortality. They’re an Alexandria, VA based non-profit that “is a recognized leader and resource in maternal and child health, reaching an estimated 10 million health care professionals, parents, and policymakers through its membership of over 100 local, state and national organizations.”

Be Healthy!

Much of the change in life expectancy over the past few centuries has come from a reduction in infant mortality. While mothers have some instinctual knowledge of how to care for their babies, much of what needs to be done is non-obvious. The National Healthy Mothers Healthy Babies Coalition has four key programs are centered around providing information that helps mothers take the best care of their babies. These include: Healthy Beginnings, National Premature Infant Health Coalition, Perinatal Nutrition Working Group, and Text4Baby. The last one is most interesting to me because it takes a simple technology medium that nearly every new mother has access to and uses it as a way to provide easily digestible tidbits of extremely important information. If you’d like to be part of this kind of work, check out National Healthy Mothers Healthy Babies Coalition’s Idealist page. While they don’t have any full-time jobs posted right now, they have internships in Partner Outreach, Communications, and Data and Evaluation. Unfortunately, the positions are unpaid, but they might help you get your foot in the door.

Links to Help You Begin Your Research

• HMHB.org
• Jobs at the National Healthy Mothers Healthy Babies Coalition (Idealist)
• About the National Healthy Mothers Healthy Babies Coalition
• Staff at the National Healthy Mothers Healthy Babies Coalition
• National Healthy Mothers Healthy Babies Coalition’s Programs
• National Healthy Mothers Healthy Babies Coalition’s Blog
• National Healthy Mothers Healthy Babies Coalition News

What have you heard about the National Healthy Mothers Healthy Babies Coalition?