History

PITTSBURGH BASED. GLOBALLY INFORMED.

The Jewish Healthcare Foundation (JHF) designed WHAMglobal to be a non-traditional advocacy, planning, and education organization. Transformational change requires an international network of women that can champion, fund, investigate, activate, and advocate. WHAMglobal is focused on learning global best practices in women's health and identifying partners from the Pittsburgh region, across the country, and around the world. In the fall of 2016, Dr. Karen Wolk Feinstein, President and CEO of JHF, presented a TEDx talk in front of a national and international audience to launch WHAMglobal.

Inspired by her own health activist journey that started in Boston in the 1970s around the “Our Bodies, Ourselves” movement, and building off of Women’s Marches and the #METOO movement, Dr. Feinstein created WHAMglobal in partnership with the national organization Women of Impact to urge women everywhere to step up and fight for progress.

In June 2017, WHAMglobal issued a Big Idea Challenge to local nonprofits, asking them to pitch their plans to improve women’s health in Western Pennsylvania for the chance to win a $10,000 award. Twenty nonprofits responded, and eight finalists pitched their plans during a celebration of big ideas around women’s health activism at the August Wilson Center in Pittsburgh. The winner of the Big Idea Challenge was the Latino Community Center, which developed a plan to improve the maternal health of Pittsburgh’s growing Latin American community. Their project inspired an intense focus for WHAMglobal on the maternal health crisis. WHAMglobal then partnered with the Latino Community Center to promote and learn from their initiative and identify ways to support liaisons through the implementation of a community health worker model.

In 2019, WHAMglobal launched the Pennsylvania Perinatal Quality Collaborative (PA PQC), which spreads best practices for behavioral health risk assessments and follow-up and treatment protocols across 61 birth sites and NICUs in Pennsylvania. Visit the PA PQC homepage here (https://www.whamglobal.org/papqc).

WHAMglobal addressed the issues of maternal and family nutrition, food security, and care integration by advocating for innovations for the Pennsylvania WIC Program. Since 2019, WHAMglobal convened a multi-disciplinary group of stakeholders to advance the WIC Program, published a white paper identifying key improvement opportunities, and organized a statewide WIC Program Summit to promote best practices and inspire change. WHAMglobal built on the momentum of the Statewide WIC Stakeholders’ Collaborative to form and facilitate a WIC champions program to support efforts to develop a roadmap for building strategic working relationships between regional WIC stakeholders, WIC agencies, and partners to streamline client outreach, referrals, enrollment, and retention efforts.

In 2019, JHF and WHAMglobal launched Pittsburgh: A Safer Childbirth City, an initiative aimed to transform the city into a safer, more equitable and accessible place to give birth. Through a $1 million multi-year grant from Merck for Mothers, Pittsburgh joined nine other cities across the country as part of the inaugural cohort of the Safer Childbirth Cities Initiative created by Merck for Mothers to foster local solutions that help cities become safer – and more equitable – places to give birth. The collaborative of local nonprofits worked together to improve coordination and quality of care among Pittsburgh service providers, train midwives and other health professionals, and support the local maternal health movement. Focused on Allegheny County, the Pittsburgh: A Safer Childbirth City Initiative invested in and supported Black women-led organizations to address Pittsburgh’s maternal and infant health disparities for Black women and babies.

As a part of the Pittsburgh: A Safer Childbirth City initiative, the Perinatal Health Equity Champions Program was established to build workforce capacity to help address racial disparities and improve maternal health care in the Pittsburgh region. Facilitated by WHAMglobal and JHF, this year-long program provided the opportunity to bring together community and hospital-based birth workers for maternal care quality improvement initiatives to address racial disparities and improve maternal care outcomes.

To further advance equitable perinatal care for Pennsylvanians, WHAMglobal convened a statewide Doula and Perinatal Community Health Worker Advisory Group of over 100 members, whose efforts led to the creation of the PA Doula Commission in 2021. The Commission will promote equitable access to doula services through workforce development for the doula profession while facilitating childbirth with dignity, improving perinatal health outcomes, and eliminating barriers by reducing healthcare disparities.

In March 2023, the WHAMglobal Board convened and voted to shift its focus to women’s health inequality in older age. From menopause to senior years, women face persistent gaps in care, whether from a lack of evidence, unfounded clinical assumptions, or a mismatch between both. WHAMglobal’s new focus aims to reimagine health professional education and research; a curriculum for health professionals that specifically addresses women's aging issues; new systems of data collection for issues impacting women over the age of 49; and ways to advance healthy and financially secure living conditions.