From Scarcity to Abundance, From Mortality to Vitality
By Allison Coffman, Director of Community Engagement, Georgia Health Initiative
As one of the most recent team members to join the Initiative, I may be newer to the field of philanthropy, but I am not new to collaborative work. In fact, I’ve dedicated my career to bringing folks together around shared purpose. I’m deeply committed to collaboration not because it’s easy (which it isn’t), but because I believe it’s essential. At its core, collaborative work is a commitment to abundance. It’s grounded in a simple but powerful belief: when we come together and share expertise, resources, and our passion, we have what we need to create healthy, thriving families and communities. This is why I was excited to join the Initiative and take on the role of helping to convene the recently launched Maternal Health Vitality Think Tank.
For too long, work in maternal health has centered on morbidity and mortality. Yes, these outcomes and measures help us see where systems are challenged, where inequities persist, and where urgent action is needed. They surface real harm and remind us of what’s at stake. But they also direct our energy toward fighting what we don’t want, rather than cultivating what we want, need, and deserve.
Like so many others, I found myself wanting more. Asking simple but important questions like:
What does it look like when things are going well?
When families feel supported, not just stabilized?
When care is not just available, but accessible, trusted, and connected?
The answer is maternal vitality. Vitality is achieved when all can experience healthy pregnancies, safely navigate childbirth, and thrive postnatally with strength, energy and capacity to maintain overall health and wellbeing. This shifts the conversation and emphasis from preventing the worst outcomes to actively creating the best ones—from managing crisis to building conditions where people can truly thrive. It moves us from a scarcity mindset to one of abundance.
In many ways, abundance starts with understanding. With being willing and able to step back and take a collective look at how this system is really working—where money is flowing, how decisions are being made, where there is overlap and gaps in investment, and where opportunities can synergistically emerge to make things work better.
It’s not about pretending resources are limitless. Instead, it’s about fully accessing, aligning, and leveraging the resources that already exist. It is about seeing assets—not just gaps—and recognizing that Georgia’s maternal health ecosystem includes community organizations, health systems, public agencies, philanthropic partners, and families themselves, all holding pieces of the solution.
This is why the Initiative, on behalf of the MHVTT, commissioned research to help us better understand maternal health dollars invested in Georgia. In partnership with a research team from NORC at the University of Chicago, we’re pleased to publish today Progress Towards Vitality: A Review of Maternal Health Financing Mechanisms in Georgia.
This research helps to map not only federal and state investments for Georgia’s maternal health ecosystem, but philanthropic investments as well. While the research findings point to challenges related to fragmentation and lack of alignment toward shared goals in relation to different sources of funding, we now have a clearer picture of the resources that exist and how we can better coordinate across funding sources and efforts underway to move us toward vitality. This clearer picture better equips the MHVTT as together we strive to improve how resources flow, how these decisions are made, and how available investments can better align to meet real community needs.
As the convening partner of the MHVTT, all of us at the Initiative view our role not as directing the maternal health field, but as supporting the conditions that allow for alignment, shared learning, and collective impact. We approach our role knowing that maternal vitality won’t and can’t be achieved by any single organization or funding stream. It must be built through relationships, data-informed strategy, trust, and collaboration.
Vitality is about outcomes. Abundance is about resourcing the conditions needed to get us there.
And I truly believe that Georgia already has what it needs to move in this direction. We simply need to continuously see it more clearly, connect it more intentionally, and activate it—together.
