Progress with Breast Milk By:Alexis

I am Alexis from Silex, my partner Sierra and I have partnered with Mothers Milk Bank to increase Advocacy for African American Women. For the past few weeks we have worked on recognizing the problem and brainstorming solutions. We are also working to contact Mothers Milk bank to obtain additional statistics to support our project.

When recognizing the problem we created a problem statement, we proceeded to deliver a problem statement presentation. Our problem statement is: American Acceptance for breast milk is low the problem is occurring when African American mothers do not want to give their baby in need donated breast milk. The problem is important because of the adverse side effects that became present due to the lack of human breast milk. Specifically a mother who accepted donated milk from mother’s milk bank saved the life of her baby. Baby Camilla would have died had her mother not accepted the donated breast milk. This example shows the importance of an infant receiving the proper nutrition from human.

In addition to identifying the problem we had to develop a solution. When brainstorming a solution we made an online collaboration of ideas and then we later compiled our best ideas into a solution. The solution that we have developed involves three components: education, outreach and connection. Outreach includes a class held at hospitals based off of a slide show presentation, education includes an informational brochure and connection includes a social media page. The key point of our project is diversity, after looking into the current social media of Mother’s Milk Bank we have observed the extreme lack of racial diversity. We plan to increase racial diversity on social media to appeal to the African American mothers and  make them feel more comfortable with the Mothers Milk Bank. Through our solution we  hope  to educate African American Women of the importance of accepting donated breast milk.

Now that we have identified  the problem and created a solution we are working to obtain statistics and information to become better educated on the topic and include in our classes and brochures. We are also working on making our solution more practical for the mothers that we are trying to help. Some ideas that we have developed to make our solution more practical include sharing our presentation with the hospital for easy accesses to the mothers in their crucial times of decision making.

Our next steps for our project include contacting nurses that work in the NICU for their personal encounters with mothers and the topic of donor breast milk. We are really pleased with the progress of our project and hope to achieve our final goal of helping African American mothers and their babies.