Healthy Beginnings

Improving outcomes for expecting parents, caregivers, and kids.

About

Setting the stage for health and wellbeing from pre-cradle to career 

A healthy beginning sets the stage for health and well-being for a person’s entire life. BRICK’s Healthy Beginnings program is designed for expecting parents and parents of children ages 0 -5 to improve the outcomes of children and families by reducing sources of stress, strengthening children's core skills and supporting responsive relationships.

Healthy Beginnings is a program of BRICK and South Ward Neighborhood Promise. Together, we’re dedicated to creating the right conditions for early childhood development to improve long term outcomes for children and families. 

Healthy Beginnings has six critical pillars of its model: quality health care + community based perinatal supports, two-generation family support using social determinants of health, quality early childhood programming, a 0-5 peer community, policy change, and perinatal workforce development. This strategy is implemented across two distinct periods in a parent/child’s life: Prenatal through 6 months of a child’s life; 7 months of a child’s life through 5 years.

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Help support families create a solid foundation for their future.

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Jazmin Rivera
Managing Director of Programs, Monitoring & Evaluation
Cristina Ramos
Assistant Director of Perinatal Pathways
Juwana Montgomery
Assistant Director of Healthy Beginnings
Jazmin Rivera
Managing Director of Programs, Monitoring & Evaluation
Cristina Ramos
Assistant Director of Perinatal Pathways
Juwana Montgomery
Assistant Director of Healthy Beginnings

Support Healthy Beginnings

Help support families create a solid foundation for their future.

Donate

Our approach

A healthy beginning for all children and families 

We work to ensure that all children have the necessary foundations for a successful and healthful life through our focus on six key pillars: quality health care and community-based perinatal support, two-generation family support, quality early childhood programming, a 0-5 peer community, policy change, and perinatal workforce development. This strategy is implemented across two distinct periods in a parent and child’s life: prenatal through 6 months of a child’s life; 7 months of a child’s life through 5 years.

“When you have a baby, it can be both a fulfilling and isolating experience. Being a part of the Healthy Beginnings parents' group has given me the balance I needed. It provided a platform to share my experiences and was incredibly beneficial to my mental health.”

Kadeidra, Parent Support Group participant

Our six pillars

  1. Bridging Quality Healthcare & Community Based Supports
    • Quality Health Care: Healthy Beginnings (HB) recognizes the importance of quality health care at the early stage of human development and the importance of laying the foundation for good health. In the future, Healthy Beginnings will operate out of the South Ward Wellness Center and provide direct connection between obstetrics/gynecology, pediatric services and community birth workers. The center is designed to hear the voices of women, particularly Black and Brown women, and listen to their needs and support the holistic development of their children. The center will also house two critical programs: Healthy Steps and Centering Pregnancy. Presently, HB staff work closely with local providers to provide streamlined referrals and warm handoffs to care.
    • Community-Based Perinatal Supports: HB provides culturally responsive, comprehensive, community-based perinatal supports to birthing people in the Newark region. HB staffs a care team that includes certified doulas, community health workers/navigators, and a Licensed Social Worker to ensure birthing people have the essential physical and emotional supports in place to birth and parent with confidence and safety. 
  2. Family Support
    • The Healthy Beginnings family support pillar is designed to help families thrive, become economically stable, and to create supportive home environments and routines in order for children to be successful. Our internal program delivers direct services that are tailored to individual needs and coordinated through two service lines: 
      1. A stability service for families in crisis
      2. An innovative milestones service, in which state certified Community Health Workers (CHWs) partner with parents and children to monitor their progress against evidence-informed milestones developed for each individual's life stage.,,
    • HB does not deliver all of these services alone but partners with over 30 local organizations to support children and families. All of these services are linked together through our state of the art database that links all partners together. 
  3. Quality Early Childhood Programming
    • Quality early childhood education is essential to creating a strong foundation for a child’s future development and a strong base for lifelong learning and learning abilities, including cognitive and social development. HB builds a network of existing quality early childhood partners. In addition, by being part of the HB network, the early childhood centers understand the importance of alignment and connection with the overall HB model.
  4. Peer Community
    1. The HB peer community is designed to bring families together to share common concerns, praise each other, build connections and together meet individual and collective goals. HB currently uses three methods to build a peer community:
      1. Parent Support Group: The Healthy Beginnings Parent Support Group fosters community among mothers at similar stages of pregnancy or parenting. It helps build essential skills for managing life's challenges, providing a supportive network and resources to navigate parenthood confidently.
      2. Loyalty Program: HB’s loyalty program is designed to encourage children and families to participate in the community of practice and meet family’s needs by providing essential family items like formula or diapers. Each family is given a loyalty account and the more activities they participate in the more points they accumulate. After collecting a certain amount of points, each family can redeem their points at the HB store for items such as diapers or formula.
      3. Community Programming: HB aims to curate a yearly calendar of activities that participants can attend to help build the peer community and build relationships. These events will be a mixture of fun and informational activities.
  5. Policy
    • Establishing a presence in the halls of government, HB works to maintain strong relationships with elected officials and policy makers as a known voice in the community, meeting with city, state and federal officials as well as hospital, labor and philanthropic thought leaders.
  6. Perinatal career pathways
    • HB is operating a community anchored perinatal career pathways pipeline to increase the number of high quality, culturally congruent birth workers such as midwives, doulas, lactation consultants and perinatal community health workers. We have officially launched our community perinatal health associate (CPHA) training in May. This program uses the HealthConnect One curricula to train doulas with foundational knowledge in public health and trauma informed approaches.

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We're improving outcomes for expecting parents, caregivers, and kids.

Office

534 Clinton Avenue Newark, New Jersey 07108