A women’s wellness center in St. Louis is providing pregnant people in the city free doula care, mental health therapy and peer group support to help lower maternal health disparity rates.
The St. Louis Health Department offered Korede House a $500,000 ARPA grant last fall to provide emotional and mental support during pregnancy and up to one year postpartum. For two years, 50 women can participate in the Stage Program. To qualify for it, women must live in St. Louis or in one of the city’s Promise Zones.
“What I found is that we do a really good job admiring the problem. We talk about the data, there are blogs, there are complaints, there are all these things, but there is not a lot actually engaged in solving the problem,” said Ronke Faleti, founder of Korede House. “That's why this partnership is so exciting, because the [city’s] department of health recognizes that there is a missing infrastructure … and our program happens to fill that bucket.”
As a mother of four, Faleti said she could have used mental and emotional support from a doula and her peers earlier in her motherhood journey, so she would not have to experience it alone.
“That critical first year is a very isolating time period, and I know I didn't realize that what we were looking for was a doula,” she said, “In this culture, I think it's the things that we say on the group chats, the things that we talk about privately and it's the pain that we're all experiencing but not really addressing.”
According to the 2024 March of Dimes report card, Missouri received a “D” because of its high maternal and infant mortality rates. City officials were moved by these rates and pushed to find more ways to provide support to birthing people, especially those in communities of color.
Completing 13 gestational exams is hard for some mothers in the city, and not having physical and mental support during pregnancy drives up the maternal disparities in Missouri’s communities of color, said Bobie Williams, director of family, community and school health for the St. Louis Health Department.
“Birthing moms go through a myriad of challenges and hurdles that they have to overcome in order to have a healthy pregnancy … and for a lot of women this is their first time experiencing something as important as birthing a healthy baby,” Williams said.
City health officials and Faleti said the first year of postpartum is crucial for healthy maternal outcomes. The Stage Program will allow women to access doula care with three prenatal visits and support for postpartum visits. Women can also access new mom digital education content, culturally competent mental health assessments, connections with family transition specialists and virtual therapy.
“Having someone who has been through it (pregnancy) and to have those said resources when needed is pivotal,” Williams said.
Participants can also receive peer support through a 12-week structured group program that focuses on building friendships and helping moms shape their identity outside of motherhood.
“We want to make sure that you have community care, they say it takes a village to raise a kid, and everybody's constantly looking for the village because we've gotten away from a lot of our ancestral roots,” Faleti said. “We have to teach it again.”
Although any pregnant person can apply and receive services from this program, Faleti and health officials want people of color, especially Black women, to take advantage of opportunities like the Stage Program and other initiatives to start to close the gap between white and Black maternal deaths in Missouri. Black women in Missouri are three times as likely to die within the first year of pregnancy than white women.
“Because of the heightened focus on the Black maternal health crisis, Black women have absorbed this information that they’re going to be mistreated, that something bad is going to happen to them, that they're going to die, and that's not true,” Faleti said. “They're going to live, they're going to thrive, and so we want them to walk away with that and actually feel it.”
