Maternity Care Coalition (MCC) is a community-based nonprofit organization serving Pennsylvania and Delaware with over four decades of commitment to improving maternal and child health and early care and education. MCC’s mission is to improve the health and well-being of pregnant women and parenting families and enhance school readiness for children 0—3. We achieve this through direct service, advocacy, and research, in collaboration with individuals, families, providers, and communities. We envision a future where parents impacted by racial and social inequities can birth with dignity, parent with autonomy, and raise babies who are healthy, growing, and thriving.
MCC was founded as an advocacy organization in Philadelphia in 1980 by professionals and community members concerned by the appalling rate of infant mortality in the region. In 1989, MCC expanded its program to include direct service delivery, opening its first MOMobile® site to provide critically needed support to birthing people and families with young children through home visiting. Since then, MCC has acquired in-depth experience in program development, implementation, and management of complex programs which have expanded in reach and intensity in response to our community’s growing needs. Our "bottom-up" strategy of building trust with families enables parents and caregivers to access a range of support, services, and programs. Since its founding, MCC has assisted over 150,000 families across the region and has demonstrated considerable expertise working with pregnant people and families with children ages 0—3 with histories that include trauma, perinatal depression, substance use, interpersonal violence, and criminal justice involvement. In addition to direct services, MCC’s comprehensive approach includes advocacy at the local, state, and national levels on maternal and child health and early care and education issues, as well as academic partnerships and community-engaged research.
We envision a future where parents impacted by racial and social inequities can birth with dignity, parent with autonomy, and raise babies who are healthy, growing, and thriving.
Maternity Care Coalition centers the voices and lived experiences of the people we serve in all aspects of our work. In promotion of our work and services, relationship building with existing or potential partners, conducting research and evaluation on the impact of our work, and advocating for policies to enhance health equity, we create and share opportunities to our clients, staff, and community members to share their stories directly.
Storytelling can happen in a variety of ways and finding storytellers, preparing them for the opportunity at hand, and ethically collecting and sharing stories are processes that touch every area of the agency. While storytelling is ongoing in the agency, we want to formalize our processes, including story collection, informed consent, and a compensation model.
We have begun thinking about this work from macro level, and identifying our ethical framework and compensation parameters. Our overall goal is to complete an agency survey/intake process to understand how storytelling is currently happening; finalizing an ethical framework and getting buy-in on a proposed, sustainable compensation model; and creating a multi-year plan with clear objectives that will result in establishing an MCC Storytelling Bureau.
To successfully complete this project, a student will submit an agency workplan that we will can follow to establish a Storytelling Bureau.
