A Kalamazoo County community group is celebrating success in bringing down the county’s infant mortality rates and reducing racial disparities in infant deaths.
Cradle Kalamazoo launched in 2014 with the goal of closing the gap between the number of Black and white babies who die in the first year of life. It’s a broad coalition that includes hospitals, community health agencies, and social service providers.
The county’s average infant mortality rate (measured as the number of deaths per 1,000 live births) from 2022-2024 was 4.5, below the statewide average of 6.3. And while death rates for both white and Black babies have declined, Black babies in Kalamazoo are now much more likely to survive their first year of life: their mortality rate has declined from an average of 15.3 in 2014-2015, to 7.0 in the most recent state data. That’s still well above the county’s rate of 2.8 for white babies, but the racial gap has narrowed significantly in the past decade.
“We’re getting babies to their first year and beyond,” said Cradle Kalamazoo executive director Jameca Patrick-Singleton.
Patrick-Singleton said Cradle Kalamazoo takes a scientific approach to the fight against infant mortality: poring over data to identify hotspots, discussing strategy, and analyzing what seems to work and what doesn’t. “So if there's a systemic issue that we're noticing, we're all at the table together to be able to have conversations, implement programs, and do what we need to do,” she said. “This is really a community effort.”
As for what does seem to work, it’s mostly a matter of identifying needs and then “wrapping supports around families,” Patrick-Singleton said. “We really try to make sure that families are able to access resources from doulas all the way through childcare, and everything in between.”
That can look like everything from in-home visits, providing meals and supplies for families with new babies, or doula support that goes beyond birth. “Our goal is to get babies to their first birthday,” Patrick-Singleton said. “But we also recognize and try to address the whole family, specifically the birthing person.”
Patrick-Singleton said there was initially “a lot of resistance” to Cradle Kalamazoo’s holistic, data-based approach, but it’s mostly faded away in the face of successful results. However, the work is still very much ongoing.
“We have seen change, and we continue to see change,” she said, but "we're constantly looking at the data and trying to figure out what's working, and what we need to pay closer attention to.”
