Pioneering Approach Aims to Improve Family Health and Wealth Across Generations

For the past 15 years, a Yale Child Study Center program called the MOMS Partnership has been working to advance maternal mental health. It began in New Haven with the aim of offering support to mothers experiencing poverty while meeting them where they were, out in the community. With its success, the program expanded to other cities—Washington, D.C., New York City, and Baltimore among them, and 10 in all, so far. And now it’s part of an imaginative new undertaking in Vermont that’s setting out to tackle the major drivers of maternal health inequities.

Dubbed the “Superbundle,” the approach unites multiple strategies to reduce maternal stress and support mental health, stabilize family income, and build wealth for the future. The idea is that by providing immediate support and initiating long-term economic security, the Superbundle will improve maternal and child health outcomes both now and across generations.

“We’ve seen how well the MOMS interventions work. They offer mothers an opportunity to come together, experience some social support, and build skills for emotional regulation and stress management,” says Hilary Hahn, MPH, MEd, executive director of the Elevate Policy Lab at Yale School of Medicine, which manages the MOMS Partnership. “And that addresses a key driver of mental health for mothers. But as part of the Superbundle, we really wanted to get at all of the key drivers of maternal health.”

The Superbundle has several components. To reduce stress and support mental health, it offers the MOMS group-based mental health program and material needs, such as diapers. To help stabilize income during critical periods, it will provide direct cash transfers to families experiencing economic shocks during pregnancy and the postpartum period. And to build future wealth, it incorporates baby bonds.

“Baby bonds are publicly funded trust accounts established for children at birth. They are an investment designed to bridge the wealth gap and typically target children from low-income families,” says Hahn. “These state-managed investments mature until the child is 18, and those funds can then be used by the child to buy a house, invest in higher education, start a business, or roll over for retirement. So it’s really an intergenerational wealth-building strategy.”

Connecticut was the first state to launch a baby bonds program. Since 2023, babies born in Connecticut and insured under the state’s Medicaid program receive a $3,200 baby bond, which could grow up to $24,000.

Vermont launched a similar program in 2025 and was an early adopter of MOMS. “Vermont wanted to do something unique for families in their mostly rural state that’s also facing a lot of maternal health challenges,” says Hahn. “The state treasurer, Mike Pieciak, is leading the way here in terms of thinking about what’s going to make a difference for families. And with the state’s leadership, we’re going to pilot this program, called First Steps Forward, in three counties within the poorest and most rural region of Vermont.”

In many ways, the Superbundle has been years in the making. In 2018, the Elevate Policy Lab began collaborating with governments and community-based partners to bring the MOMS model to more people. Vermont became the second new location in 2019.

Megan Smith, DrPH, MPH, founded the MOMS Partnership at Yale, where she was an associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and the Yale Child Study Center until 2021.

“I was doing research around maternal mental health and specifically for pregnant and parenting women who were experiencing poverty,” she says. “And we were really thinking about the unique stressors that low-income mothers and families experience related to depression, anxiety, and trauma.”

What she was finding through her research was that while laws were coming out requiring insurance companies to cover mental health services, they weren’t helping close care gaps for mothers experiencing poverty.

“We were noticing that it was so difficult to access services,” she recalls. “And that’s what sparked the MOMS Partnership. We wanted to create an approach that could be delivered in community-based settings, like supermarkets, where moms would go and not feel stigma around getting services.”

Through this work, Smith and her colleagues also discovered that diapers were a substantial source of stress for the mothers they were talking to. Diaper access was often what got in the way of getting or keeping a job.

“Often, families needed a week or more supply of diapers in order to leave their baby at a childcare center,” says Smith. “And that amount is really expensive and many mothers didn’t have access to the funds to support that. Plus, programs like SNAP and WIC didn’t cover diapers.”

Smith and her colleagues ended up finding that more so than food or housing insecurity, not having enough diapers was the largest predictor of postpartum depressive symptoms.

That research was done with the National Diaper Bank Network, and Smith joined their board soon after. A few years later when an opportunity arose to work with the network’s research department, Smith took it. She’s now chief of innovation and impact at the National Diaper Bank Network, which is leading the Superbundle.

Baby bonds first came on Smith’s radar when she was at Yale through a conversation with Darrick Hamilton, PhD, a professor at The New School who developed the concept of baby bonds. When Hamilton and his colleague David Radcliffe, also of The New School, brought the idea of baby bonds to Connecticut, they became a reality for the first time. Now they’re a key part of the Superbundle.

The Superbundle partners will be working with the Urban Institute to evaluate the pilot, and they’ll be assessing a number of maternal mental and physical health outcomes, child health and education outcomes, financial stability and economic mobility, and measures around family wellbeing, including hopefulness. They’ll also track health care and Medicaid cost savings as well as the retention of young adults in rural Vermont.

When MOMS began in New Haven, the researchers found that the program increased sense of social support among mothers and decreased stress, anxiety, and depression. And that’s held true across all 10 sites.

“We’re excited to bring these additional pieces together to really look at change in economic mobility in a more substantial way for families,” says Hahn.

Currently, the Superbundle partners are fundraising for the initiative. They plan to launch the pilot in early 2027 and continue it for three years.

“The Superbundle is focused on the social fabric of our communities and it’s acknowledging that community is really important to health,” says Smith. “But it’s also acknowledging that there are holes in that social fabric that we need to repair. The Superbundle is filling a lot of those holes and in a way that’s family centered.”

In the meantime, the Elevate team is continuing to expand the MOMS model to additional cities and partners. And there’s interest in other Superbundle sites as well.

“There’s such opportunity here,” says Hahn. “When you bring together the right supports for mothers and families, the impact can be transformative. We’re excited about what this pilot can demonstrate and the possibilities it opens for communities across the country.”