Philadelphia’s Maternal Wellness Village and Temple have teamed up to study two approaches that treat multiple factors leading to heart disease among Black birthing people. Both approaches address individual behaviors through nutrition and physical activity text messages and home blood pressure self-monitoring as well as provide training to medical care providers in order to reduce patients’ experiences of racism or mistreatment. But only one of the approaches being studied also adds supports for Black women by Black women (community doula care, mental health services, and lactation consultation) during their pregnancy, birth, and postpartum in order to learn if these supports lead to lower blood pressure and also treat social isolation, depression, and increase experiences of respectful maternity care.

This proposal aims to optimize early postpartum care for Black birthing people with HDP and create a toolkit of best practices for dissemination among Essential Hospitals.

In this pragmatic trial, we are randomizing 438 Black and Latina, Philadelphia County WIC program participants with obesity in early pregnancy to either standard WIC care or an antenatal obesity treatment arm. As part of this effort, we piloted an antiracism training for WIC nutrition professionals as a means of improving attitudes, awareness, and confidence in identifying and addressing interactions that perpetuate individual, interpersonal and systemic racism.

This project aims evaluate a mHealth-delivered behavioral weight loss intervention in Black WIC-recipients during the first postpartum year.

Our Temple-Maternity Care Coalition proposal, grounded in a reproductive and racial justice framework, aims to prepare and produce a highly qualified workforce of community-based perinatal health workers to improve health for black and brown pregnant women and their families, while providing meaningful careers for mothers in North Philadelphia who face exceedingly high levels of poverty and un/underemployment.

This study aims to evaluate the efficacy of an excessive gestational weight gain prevention intervention as an adjunct to usual obstetric care at Temple in African American women.

This research uses observational epidemiology to examine the influence of postpartum sleep duration on adiposity and cardiometabolic risk factors in urban, low-income mothers.

This study aims to minimize postpartum weight retention among low-income, Black mothers by developing, implementing, and then evaluating a technology-based behavioral intervention.