The NIH has teamed up with crowdsourcing platform HeroX to launch a $1.3 million maternal health research challenge: Connecting the Community for Maternal Health Challenge 2.0: Research Capacity Building in Maternity Care Deserts.
Responding to maternal health deserts and nationwide declines in maternity care access, the challenge will support community-based, advocacy, faith-based, and tribal-serving organizations that serve pregnant and postpartum women and their families.
“Improving maternal health starts with empowering the communities most affected,” said Jamie Elliott, vice president of customer success at HeroX. “By providing training, mentoring, proposal development support and milestone-based funding, NIH is helping ensure community organizations have a pathway to turn local knowledge into meaningful maternal health research.”
Designed to support early-stage nonacademic organizations, the challenge will fund up to 20 maternal health organizations, providing training, proposal support, and mentorship to implement projects. The challenge will narrow down organizations in four phases, awarding a $350,000 first-place prize, a $250,000 second-place prize, and up to eight $100,000 third-place prizes.
Building on its first maternal health challenge in 2022, the latest iteration is hosted by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and funded by National Institute of Nursing Research, the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research, and the Office of Research on Women’s Health. Applications for Phase 1 are now open.
