When B’more for Healthy Babies launched in 2009, the goal was local: help Baltimore respond to a devastating infant mortality crisis.
The initiative brought together the Baltimore City Health Department, health care providers, community organizations and residents to create a coordinated citywide effort to improve outcomes for mothers and babies. Since the beginning, the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs (CCP) has worked alongside B’more for Healthy Babies as its communication partner, helping shape how the effort connects with families, partners and communities.
Today, other communities are looking to Baltimore’s experience.
The city of Milwaukee, for example, recently announced plans to draw from elements of the B’more for Healthy Babies approach as it works to reduce infant mortality and longstanding racial disparities.
This fall, CCP shared lessons from the partnership with maternal and child health leaders in Pittsburgh and Portland and will bring the work to the American Public Health Association conference in San Antonio in November.
The goal isn’t to copy Baltimore’s campaigns. Every community is different, with its own history and relationships. What leaders want to understand is how communication can be built into public health work from the start, instead of tacked on later.
“Communication is where the public encounters the collective,” said CCP’s August Summers, who leads the Baltimore work.
The Safe Sleep work within B’more for Healthy Babies offers one example. In 2009, Baltimore recorded 27 sleep-related infant deaths, the highest number in the city’s history. But the number alone did not explain what communication needed to do.
Listening to residents showed that the challenge was not simply a lack of information. Caregivers were making decisions based on love, experience and the advice of people they trusted. Keeping a baby close could feel like a way to protect and comfort them.
CCP used those insights to shape a communication strategy that reflected what families were actually experiencing and made safe sleep guidance feel more doable.
The campaign included stories from Baltimore mothers who had lost babies, along with videos, print materials, a website and communication shared through community and institutional partners.
It was more than a campaign. It worked alongside services, clinical changes and community partnerships. Over time, sleep-related infant deaths dropped from 27 to seven.
And it showed something else: communication can’t stand still when people’s lives are changing.
When sleep-related infant deaths began rising again during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, the team went back to the community instead of repeating the same messages.
As Tina Suliman, a senior program officer on the Baltimore team, put it: “COVID changed people.”
Families were navigating different levels of stress, isolation and uncertainty. Caregivers still wanted clear guidance and real stories, but they also wanted to hear more about support, connection and shared responsibility. They wanted to know that safe sleep was something families and communities could work on together.
That insight changed how the team talked about the issue. The guidance stayed the same, but the way it was framed shifted.
“Safe sleep is not in tension with joy,” Suliman said.
The updated communication reminds caregivers that they’re not alone. Everyone around a baby has a role to play, and safe sleep is something communities can help support together. In that way, the message became less about compliance and more about shared care.
For CCP, one lesson from Baltimore is simple: communication shouldn’t be an afterthought. It has to be part of how public health strategies are built and adjusted over time.
“Communication is a conversation between public health systems and the people they serve,” Suliman says. “When the context changes, the conversation has to change with it.”
