State and local leaders announced on Wednesday the start of a financial assistance program to support expectant mothers and their newborn babies in Flint.
The program is called Rx Kids, since it follows a wish by Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, the Flint pediatrician who spearheaded the program, to “prescribe away poverty.”
“When you grow up in a city that's poor it's hard to be healthy and to be successful,” she said while holding a newborn beneficiary of the program, an 8-day-old infant at Flint’s Hurley Medical Center.
Rx Kids will provide expectant Flint mothers who sign up for the program with $1,500 during their pregnancies and $500 a month for the first 12 months of their babies’ lives through direct deposit or pre-paid debit cards. Families won’t be told how to spend the money or asked to account for it – a model that Dr. Hanna-Attisha says has been successful at improving maternal and infant health outcomes around the world.
The program also promises to be a way to better understand the experience of motherhood in Flint, through voluntary surveys asking about doctors' appointments as well as the expenses that are most burdensome for new moms or interactions with child welfare programs.
“This is a life changing program for moms in Flint,” said Alana Turner, a mother who is expecting her second child later this year. “It's not only a program, but a lifeline and a promise of support for every mother in our community.”
Turner and other current and expectant mothers as well as a city-based youth group offered feedback on plans for the program through its early stages.
Hanna-Attisha said the program began as “an impossible idea” just a year and a half ago. Getting denied grant funding for the project, she wondered if she would ever be able to raise enough money to pass it along to new mothers across the city.
While Washington, DC, and New York City have launched similar programs for some segments of their population, Hanna-Attisha and other officials have proclaimed Rx Kids to be first citywide program of its kind in the country – and that came with a huge cost.
Hanna-Attisha said the program began as “an impossible idea” just a year and a half ago. Getting denied grant funding for the project, she wondered if she would ever be able to raise enough money to pass it along to new mothers across the city.
She got a large dose of hope after the C.S. Mott Foundation promised a matching grant of $15 million.
“First and foremost, we care so much about Flint kids,” Mott Foundation CEO and President Ridgway White said, explaining his early support of Rx Kids. “Poverty is one of the leading indicators of health and one of the things that we can do as a foundation is try to provide programs to reduce the effects of poverty.”
White said the program seemed to offer a clear path toward reducing the traumatic impacts of poverty on children in the earliest stages of life.
While the Mott Foundation was the earliest backer, the largest contribution toward Rx Kids came from the state of Michigan through a budget allocation of $16.5 million. The City of Flint contributed $1 million through American Rescue Plan dollars. Other philanthropies and individuals helped Rx Kids reach $43 million – an amount that the organization’s leaders said will fund the project for three years.
Lauding the program, Governor Gretchen Whitmer said, it “will give every new mom in Flint the freedom and flexibility to raise their babies, and not worry about paying bills or putting food on the table.”
Flint has been the most-impoverished city with more than 25,000 residents in Michigan in recent years, and ranks among the cities with the lowest household income across the country.
