Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation is dispersing more than $770,000 to 15 organizations across the state, aiming to decrease racial inequities in perinatal health — health care leading up to and following the birth of a child.

“The grants focus on policy, advocacy, community education and workforce development,” said Reena Singh, senior program officer at the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation.

This is the second round of funding through the foundation’s Perinatal Health Initiative tackling maternal and infant health challenges across the state.

“Community-based organizations are going to be so important to the solutions as we look at maternal health,” said Katherine Rushfirth, policy director at Neighborhood Birth Center, one of the this year’s grant recipients.

Some are training midwives and doulas, others are focusing on hospitals’ readiness, while yet others are turning their attention to community education.

For some recipients, efforts are targeted at physical health and well-being. For others, the goal is mental health.

The Blue Cross Blue Shield Foundation’s efforts join other legislative and policy strategies to improve maternal and infant health in Massachusetts.

In 2024, the Legislature passed an omnibus bill targeting various facets of maternal health. Advocates are currently working to support a second piece of legislation that would build on the first law and close gaps left by some of its provisions.

And it’s also on the radar of the state Department of Public Health’s Advancing Health Equity in Massachusetts initiative, which is targeting maternal health as well as social determinants of health — factors beyond medical care from a hospital or clinic that impact health — to close racial and regional gaps in health outcomes.

A 2023 report from the Boston Public Health Commission found that, locally, communities of color and especially Black communities bear the brunt of poor perinatal health outcomes.

The report found that Black infants were more likely to be born preterm and more likely to be born at a low birth weight. Infant death rates for Black babies were more than three times higher than their white counterparts.

Broadly, the grants focus on policy advocacy, community education and workforce development, said Singh.

Those focus areas were identified following conversations that the Blue Cross Blue Shield Foundation hosted with individuals and organizations working to advance perinatal health, first in anticipation of its 2024 grant cycle and then to collect feedback on how the first round went, ahead of its 2025 grants.

Two Roxbury organizations will further their work through the grant funding.

For Neighborhood Birth Center, which received $60,000 in the 2025 funding cycle, the Blue Cross Blue Shield Foundation grant will help support the formation of a statewide chapter of the American Association of Birth Centers for it and six other birth center organizations — all but one of which are still working to open their doors — across Massachusetts.

“That entity that represents all the birth centers is going to be able to move into different policymaker spaces, health system spaces, health insurance spaces to talk about birth centers as a collective,” Rushfirth said.

Neighborhood Birth Center is still looking to start providing services, after a bid to redevelop two houses on Winthrop Street in Roxbury into its facility was rejected by Boston’s Zoning Board of Appeal in February, following pushback from some abutters and other neighbors.

Community pushback largely focused on the proposal’s intention to bring non-residential uses to the area which is zoned for multifamily housing. The plan from Neighborhood Birth Center would have created an almost 20,000-square-foot facility, over half of which would have served the birth center. The remaining space would have been split between community space and offices for five nonprofit organizations.

For some, the nonprofit offices were the biggest point of concern and said that if it were just a birth center they might have been fine with the project. Others took issue with the non-residential uses generally.

Neighbors also raised concerns about the potential historical legacy of the houses that would be torn down. Some said they were frustrated by what they felt was a lack of communication from the team behind the Community Movement Commons project — the official name for the proposed development.

The team is slated to go back before the Zoning Board of Appeal later this month with a new proposal that takes the feedback they received into account, said Nashira Baril, Neighborhood Birth Center’s executive director.

In a late-summer newsletter from the birth center, Baril described an “archipelago” model, with a smaller clinical facility at the Winthrop Street site, with more parking and green space and maintaining one of the homes for residential use. A proposed second Roxbury site will serve as home to the nonprofits and a community space, a partnership Baril has said is important to maintain for the financial stability of the birth center.

But the lack of a physical space hasn’t stopped the staff and leadership at Neighborhood Birth Center from continuing with other efforts like policy advocacy, including the push for a chapter of the American Association of Birth Centers.

The vision of having a local chapter of the association came out of a day-long retreat, also funded by the Blue Cross Blue Shield Foundation in February.

That event, which Rushfirth described as “first of its kind” in Massachusetts, highlighted a commitment from the state’s current and pending birth centers to increase collaboration, especially on some of the thornier policy issues birth centers in the state face, like reimbursement rates for midwives.

A second Roxbury organization, Propa City Community Outreach, will use its $25,000 grant to expand work to support families who have experienced pregnancy loss.

That work includes providing resources to families when they experience loss, including through care packages, grief support groups and assistance in finding access to therapy or funeral support.

“Fourteen years ago [when Propa City was founded], we did not talk about loss like it’s being talked about now,” said Simone Crawford, Propa City’s founder and executive director. “But it’s still kind of stigmatized, and so it’s important to fund work that is making it — not normal — but making people feel like there’s a community for them when this happens.”

The funding will allow Propa City to expand what parts of the city it works with and how many families it can serve at once, as well as including new ways of reaching community members, said Crawford.

Propa City is also writing and rolling out training for health care providers and other community organizers and leaders whose work intersects with families experiencing loss.

Crawford said she appreciated the Blue Cross Blue Shield Foundation’s willingness to provide funds to support expansions of existing efforts, something she said grant programs aren’t always willing to do.

“It’s actually really hard for nonprofits, especially smaller nonprofits like us, to get funding,” Crawford said. “There’s a certain budget you need; there’s a certain way you have to do it; you have to know all the language; you have to be able to write things up in a certain way. And there’s a lot of grants that really want you to have new projects all the time in order to prove that you deserve money.”

The Blue Cross Blue Shield grants mark the second year of the initiative, which launched in 2024 with a smaller effort to explore what the foundation could do in the perinatal health space.

“It was kind of to test the waters and see what we could learn and what our role could be, given that this was a new space for us,” Singh said.

The new cycle of funding expands the initiative’s budget — in its first year, the program offered a total of $415,000 while in its second year it offered $771,000; the average grant award rose nearly $22,000.

It also expands the timeline.

The first year’s awards were part of a one-year program. Efforts in the second cycle will be funded for two years.

The grants’ community focus stems from when the Blue Cross Blue Shield Foundation started to explore a move into the perinatal health space. To feel out how they might be able to support efforts to advance health efforts in the arena, they spoke with organizations and leaders already working on the topic.

“We did reading, looked at the data, looked at the research, but really wanted to talk to people already working in the space to find out about the environment,” Singh said. “Taking the input and the conversations that we had with those individuals and blending that with the goals and visions of the foundation, we built this program.”

Rushfirth said she thinks the foundation’s willingness to talk directly with providers and organizers in the space, which she said is often overlooked, is important, especially as midwives and other maternal health providers see renewed focus amid city and state health equity efforts.

“They’ve given us a platform,” Rushfirth said. “They’ve elevated the issue, which is really, really helpful.”