The mission of the Maternal Health Learning and Innovation Center (MHLIC) is to foster collaboration and learning among diverse stakeholders to accelerate evidence-informed interventions advancing equitable maternal health outcomes through engagement, innovation, and policy.
The Center’s central goal is to provide a continuum of learning opportunities that enhance the capacity of all maternal health practitioners across the country. Established in November 2019, the MHLIC aims to advance federal and state-level efforts to eliminate preventable maternal deaths and reduce severe maternal morbidity, using equity as the cornerstone of all services. We actively work to center antiracist principles and continuous intercultural development.
The MHLIC directly supports twelve HRSA-funded collaborating partners in nine states and three rural regions with information and capacity-building resources. In addition, the MHLIC also serves as a national hub to connect maternal health learners with maternal health “doers” across the country, cataloging and disseminating best practices related to maternal health improvement.
Comprised of a multidisciplinary team of capacity-building and maternal health experts from around the country, with a central hub at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the MHLIC provides resources and capacity-building assistance in three specific areas: maternal health policy, community and provider engagement, and maternal health innovations. Our team includes maternal health, policy, innovation, engagement and implementation experts from the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), Association of Maternal and Child Health Programs (AMCHP), Georgia Health Policy Center, R.A.C.E. for Equity, Reaching Our Sisters Everywhere, PH Solutions, and the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, the Jordan Institute for Families at the UNC School of Social Work and the UNC School of Medicine.
As a continuous learning organization, the MHLIC believes in co-creation of impactful content and is always on the lookout for existing maternal health resources we can highlight. Our goal is to lift up and link to the existing and emerging resources available from partners across the country. If you have a resource you’d like to see added, contact us.
MHLIC is Committed to Centering Equity
MHLIC is committed to centering equity in our work to improve maternal health, which we recognize as the mental, emotional, and physical wellbeing of individuals during pregnancy, childbirth, and the year following pregnancy. To improve outcomes for all, we commit to particularly focusing on efforts to support those who have been historically marginalized and are consequently made most at risk for maternal mortality and morbidity: people who have experienced racism and those living in rural and frontier regions of the United States.
Our full equity statement can be found here.
This project is supported by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under grant number U7CMC33636 State Maternal Health Innovation Support and Implementation Program Cooperative Agreement. This information or content and conclusions are those of the author and should not be construed as the official position or policy of, nor should any endorsements be inferred by HRSA, HHS, or the U.S. Government.