SFV AAIMM is a local collaborative of agencies, CBOs, faculty, students, and others who seek to listen, learn, research, inform, and make policy change around intolerable inequities for African American Women in the SFV, 4x as likely to die in childbirth than any other ethnic group, their infants being 3x as likely to die before the age of 1 year.
In the San Fernando Valley (SFV) and Los Angeles at large, for decades, African American women die at about 4 times the rate of women in all other racial/ethnic groups; their infants are about 3 times as likely to die before the age of one year. In response, SFV AIMM was formed by the Department of Public Health as a collaborative of SFV agencies, community-based organizations, and CSUN faculty and students who conduct research, provide university research intensives, public health data collection and education, grant-writing, service delivery evaluation, and policy advocacy in response to this intolerable and inhuman inequity in our local community.
The central African American Infant and Maternal Mortality (AAIMM) program of First5LA is an initiative based in decades of racial inequities in infant and maternal mortality for African Americans in the Los Angeles and San Fernando regions. The HERE Center is working with the SFV Department of Public Health (DPH), El Proyecto del Barrio, First5LA, and the Valley Care Community Consortium (VCCC) to implement recommendations from an extensive report prepared by AAIMM central to work on issues specific to the San Fernando Valley. Funding for this initiative has been removed from the SFV as region-wide initiative to focus on SPAs 1, 6, and 8, yet the SFV continues to see unnecessary deaths attributable to racism that translate to 3 times as many African American infants dying before the age of 1 year and 4 times as many African American women dying in childbirth compared with any other racial/ethnic group in the Valley.
With our community partners, we are identifying a piece of the puzzle for intervention around: (a) working directly with pregnant women and new mothers to understand their rights, (b) working with an entire clinic staff to introduce humanizing processes and interactions and anti-racism training, (c) conduct an experiment that compares health and cost outcomes for an experimental and control clinic for all women and, more specifically, African American women and infants, conducting an in-depth study of the experiences of African American women in humanizing and traditional health care systems.
