Elevate
Investing in Mothers, Investing in Our Future
When communities invest in maternal mental health, they are investing in children and families, and our future. When communities invest in maternal mental health, families can experience increased stability, and children can experience secure attachment, healthy social-emotional development, and positive cognitive outcomes. Increasing access to mental health services creates opportunities for improving parenting strategies and developing better coping mechanisms. Improved maternal mental health can lead to increased workforce participation and productivity. An investment in maternal mental health means healthier, economically secure families, thriving babies and children, and flourishing communities.
Elevating Maternal Mental Health
Based in the Child Study Center in the Yale School of Medicine, Elevate develops, tests and scales strategies to support the mental health needs of overburdened, underresourced mothers. Elevate collaborates with government and community partners focused on social and economic mobility programming to design, culturally adapt, deliver and evaluate maternal mental health supports. Elevate’s core program is the Mental Health Outreach for MotherS (MOMS) Partnership®. MOMS Partnership is a culturally responsive, community-based program model that continuously centers the voices of mothers. Designed to build social support and teach skills that mothers can apply in their daily lives, the MOMS Partnership consistently demonstrates significant mental health outcomes for participants including reductions in depressive and anxiety symptoms. Teams implementing MOMS are excited about the impact that MOMS has on their effectiveness and in their community. Food insecurity, unstable or poor-quality housing, diaper need, and interpersonal violence – mothers in poverty are more likely to experience these stressors and they take a huge toll on mental health. Mothers in poverty are 4x more likely to experience depression but have significantly less access to mental health supports. As we continue to face a mental health crisis in this country, communities need effective strategies to offer high-quality mental health supports to mothers. Elevate can help.
A Note About our Language: Why We Use the Term “Mother”
The Mental health Outreach for MotherS (MOMS) Partnership® was established with the conviction that the unique socioeconomic, cultural, and psychological implications of gender and sex, particularly for parenting and caregiving individuals, demand mental health programming tailored to the experiences of mothers and women. This language is imperfect, though. At Elevate, we use the terms Mother or Mom to refer to the individuals who we seek to serve through the MOMS Partnership Model. They have diverse identities and roles in the lives of the children for whom they are caregivers: kin and non-kin, custodial and informal. Our definition of mothers thus includes anyone who is pregnant, birthing, in the postpartum period, or parenting children.
Contact Us
Mailing address: Elevate, Yale School of Medicine, Yale Child Study Center, 350 George St., 3rd Floor, New Haven, CT 06511