2024

Impact Report

Every Mother Counts is deeply committed to learning and growth. We believe that we can only make meaningful progress on maternal health if we approach our work with curiosity, humility, and the courage to try new things. We embrace change and view every experience, challenge, and new opportunity as a chance to improve our efforts with grace, flexibility, and fresh perspective.

In 2024, guided by the results of our ambitious strategic planning process in 2023, we began implementing the next phase of our evolution, grounded in continuous learning. The process affirmed Every Mother Counts’ strong reputation for elevating the voices of partners and women who might not otherwise be heard, and surfaced opportunities to deepen our impact by sharpening our grantmaking focus and strengthening organizational capacity, starting with leadership. One of the first and most significant steps in bringing our strategic vision to life was expanding our leadership team. In the spring, we welcomed two leaders: Yalda Nikoomanesh as our first Vice President of Philanthropy and Divya Sooryakumar as Vice President of Programs & Impact. Together with our existing leadership team, they are helping guide Every Mother Counts forward with clarity, intention, and care.

Staff from Every Mother Counts visit Commonsense Childbirth at their clinic in Winter Garden, Florida. (Yalda Nikoomanesh, 2024)

We also began evolving our grantmaking portfolio to focus more intentionally on community-centered care and diversifying and strengthening the maternity care workforce to ensure that pregnant women have access to care that is grounded in their communities and delivered by a growing, more representative network of trusted providers. As part of this shift, we welcomed new grantee partners, whose work you’ll learn more about in this report. In parallel, and in alignment with our commitment to better integrate the core levers of our work, we conducted an analysis of our grantee partners’ policy priorities, also featured in this report, to identify opportunities to amplify and bolster their advocacy efforts.

As a team in transition, this year we prioritized creating opportunities for connection with newer team members which included visiting our donor and grantee partner communities around the world. In January, we traveled to Montgomery, Alabama where we toured the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Sites and met Michelle Browder, the artist and activist behind the Mothers of Gynecology Monument. Then, in February, while in Kenya, members of our team met with Dr. Milton Ochieng’, co-founder of Lwala Community Alliance, one of our grantee partners in East Africa, and his team. These experiences came full circle at MPower 2024, our annual Mother’s Day luncheon, where we recognized Michelle Browder with the Orange Rose Award for her powerful and creative contributions to advancing maternal health equity and highlighted Lwala and Dr. Ochieng’s work in conversation with author and podcast host, Kelly Corrigan. These opportunities are intentional and demonstrate our commitment to relationship-building and stewardship that is essential to building connections between the work we support and our efforts to engage and educate our broader community around our partners near and far.

We are continuously learning, listening deeply, and acting courageously, with one purpose: to ensure every mother, everywhere, has access to safe, respectful, and equitable care. What we learn directly shapes how we support our grantee partners and advocate for change, strengthening programs on the ground and driving progress in the systems that shape maternal health. As we grow in knowledge, we grow in impact, and by sharing those lessons, we bring more people into the movement, building collective power to realize maternal health as a human right for all.