News and Stories

Through funding from Kaiser Permanente, the UC San Diego Center for Community Health (CCH), housed under ACTRI, collaborated with the UC San Diego Human Milk Institute (HMI) and the San Diego County Childhood Obesity Initiative (COI), funded by the County of San Diego HHSA, to tackle childhood obesity by broadening equitable access to human milk. Together, we established a diverse Community Advisory Board (CAB) composed of community members, parents, lactation professionals, and advocates who helped guide every stage of the project. By centering lived experiences, cultural knowledge, and professional expertise, this board ensured that our efforts remained community-informed and culturally responsive. While this initiative helped shape an online resource directory and set criteria and expand funding for lactation-focused mini-grants, our core focus centered on deeply listening to families.

At the heart of this initiative was a commitment to listening. Through a community-informed needs assessment that included surveys, focus groups, and a community sensemaking session, we explored feeding experiences, perinatal lactation support, culturally responsive care, and awareness of donor human milk.  Our team gathered vital insights and data through a survey, focus groups, and a community sensemaking session, specifically reaching populations often left out of maternal health data. Through this process, the community identified two clear priority areas. First, we must provide perinatal mental health support alongside lactation care both prenatally and postpartum. Second, we need to optimize the prenatal period to offer more robust lactation support, education, and resource navigation.

As one focus group participant shared, "I think what I really would have wanted to know is the mental and emotional work that actually comes with breastfeeding... I just spent all day nursing, and I didn't accomplish anything else...I never really had much talk about the mental-emotional side of work that comes with it." The project also informed the development of community resources, including an online lactation resource directory and expanded support for community-based lactation mini-grants. More importantly, it provided a roadmap for future action rooted in community-defined needs and priorities.

CCH & HMI staff member, Shana Wright, presented these vital results to over 400 attendees at the Human Milk Institute's 2026 annual symposium and hosted an interactive workshop to engage participants in next steps. We are actively disseminating these findings so partners across the Childhood Obesity Initiative and the San Diego Human Milk Access Network can collaborate to address these community-identified priorities. 

To get involved or collaborate on these priority areas, please reach out to Shana Wright at smwright@ucsd.edu.