Maternal and Child Health and Mental Well-Being: Cornerstones of a Thriving Community: Webinar Resources
This webinar recording and slide deck are part of the Whole Child, Whole Family, Whole System Webinar Series.
The health and mental health of mothers, birthing parents, and fathers form the foundation of a child’s well-being, a family’s stability, and a thriving community. Yet, for too many—especially in historically marginalized communities—maternal health outcomes are overshadowed by preventable complications, high mortality and morbidity rates, and systemic failures that leave families without the care and support they deserve.
When maternal and perinatal health and mental health is prioritized, families are stronger. Access to quality prenatal and postpartum care, mental health support, and stable social and economic resources ensures that mothers and all birthing parents can stay healthy, recover well, and build a strong foundation for their children and families to flourish. However, many communities, particularly those impacted by systemic inequities, face perinatal care deserts, where access to essential maternal health and mental health services are severely limited or nonexistent. These gaps, combined with barriers to health and mental health care, racial disparities, and economic instability, continue to put the lives of mothers, birthing parents, and babies at risk, making it critical to address these systemic failures with sustainable, community-driven solutions.
In this webinar, we discussed why maternal health and mental health must be at the center of family and community well-being. This webinar highlights the urgent need for systemic change, explore solutions that address maternal health inequities, and emphasize the role of policy, healthcare, and community support—including the role of fathers– in ensuring that every family receives the care they need.
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Plan of Safe Care: Making Safety Policy a Strategy for Child and Family Well-being Webinar Resources
Archived Webinar April 9, 2025
These resources are from the final webinar of the series “Moving Away from Family Separation: Cross-Systems strategies to Support Young Children and Families at Risk of Child Welfare Involvement."
Early Childhood Systems Building: Whole Child, Whole Family, Whole System
Video April 3, 2025
Early childhood professionals recognize that the child- and family-serving systems that are not generally considered to be under the umbrella of the early childhood system—like housing, economic development, and transportation—are less often viewed as opportunities for or barriers to child and family well-being. Each of these systems, and how they interact with one another, impacts a child’s outcome. It is up to early childhood systems builders to identify the barriers to positive outcomes that result from an issue with any of the elements within the overall system. This is one of the early childhood systems builders’ greatest challenges, as these barriers are deeply interwoven with our country’s history and ongoing practice of discrimination and disinvestment. This video describes how BUILD views an Early Childhood System that focuses on the whole child, the whole family, and whole systems.
How to Build a Bridge: Policy, Practice, and Relationships in Cross-Systems Collaboration: Webinar Resources
Video March 19, 2025
This recording and resources are from the webinar How to Build a Bridge: Policy, Practice, and Relationships in Cross-Systems Collaboration, part of the Moving Away from Family Separation: Cross-systems Strategies to Support Young Children and Families at Risk of Child Welfare Involvement webinar series.