Tarrant County nonprofit is awarded $4 million to make pregnancy and childbirth safer
By Miranda Suarez, Ron Corning
September 29, 2026 at 1:06 PM CDT
A major new investment is coming to North Texas aimed at making pregnancy and childbirth safer for mothers.
My Health My Resources of Tarrant County has been awarded more than $4 million dollars from Texas Heath and Human Services (HHS) to expand its work with the North Texas Maternal Health Accelerator.
The Accelerator brings together hospitals, medical schools and community organizations with an ambitious goal to reduce severe pregnancy complications in Dallas and Tarrant counties by more than 20% in three years. Its work ranges from identifying high-risk pregnancies earlier to connecting women with care and resources before and after they give birth.
Mattie Parker is the mayor of Fort Worth and Dr. Stuart Flynn is the founding dean of TCU’s Burnett School of Medicine and principal investigator for the Maternal Health Accelerator. They joined NTX Now hosts Miranda Suarez and Ron Corning to discuss the initiative and what they hope the grant will help them accomplish.
These interview highlights have been edited for length and clarity. To hear the conversation in full, click the 'listen' button above.
Mayor Parker, you first brought community leaders together around this issue back in 2022. What were you seeing in Fort Worth that convinced you maternal and infant health required this kind of coordinated response? And what can this new $4 million state investment allow you to do that you couldn't do before?
It was hard to believe four years ago we created the Tarrant County Maternal Infant Health Coalition. Dozens of organizations all across Tarrant County and Fort Worth really believed in the work. The Texas Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee had come out with a specific report around pregnancy-related deaths, and knowing that 80% of those deaths could have been prevented across Texas was incredibly troubling to all of us involved.
So fast forward, we worked together as a county for about two years before we actually formed this Texas accelerator that created the opportunity to draw down additional money through Health and Human Services toward this work. We are incredibly thankful and excited to keep at our goal of a 20% reduction in severe obstetric complications across North Texas.
Dr. Flynn, we know that many health reviews have consistently found disparities in maternal mortality and morbidity with Black women disproportionately affected. Will this accelerator program close that racial disparity and how will you know if it's succeeding?
The answer is yes. First of all, thanks to the DFW Hospital Council, we can map 28 different data points in our two counties, and those include where the highest risk patients are. Those tend to be both African American moms and Hispanic [moms]. Now, we can track in those regions where we start to see a change and that change is improvement.
The improvement is a decreased number of transfusions, which make up 75% of our severe obstetric complications, and the other part is postpartum, where we now—with MHMR and other organizations—can actually have one-on-one with nurses, home visits if necessary, and that deals with a lot of things, but just to be very succinct: it deals with high blood pressure issues which can cause strokes and death in postpartum moms, and also deals with their mental well-being.
Mayor Parker, looking forward to the future of this program, is there anything else that you want to tackle? Is there anything else that this program will be able to accomplish?
I think one thing I have to mention is since we started the North Texas Accelerator in 2024, we were on a fast path to raise philanthropic dollars to make this work stand up and be possible. Working alongside both national and local funders, over 14 of those partners, we've raised over $25 million, and we're still climbing.
Candidly, this work will only be successful if we can scale it across all of North Texas and across the United States, and we importantly want to share this information with other partners. There's no reason to hide the ball. We are saving lives of women and children.
Miranda Suarez and Ron Corning are the hosts of KERA's NTX Now. Got a tip? Email Miranda at msuarez@kera.org or Ron at rcorning@kera.org.
KERA News is made possible through the generosity of our members. If you find this reporting valuable, consider making a tax-deductible gift today. Thank you.
My Health My Resources of Tarrant County has been awarded more than $4 million dollars from Texas Heath and Human Services (HHS) to expand its work with the North Texas Maternal Health Accelerator.
The Accelerator brings together hospitals, medical schools and community organizations with an ambitious goal to reduce severe pregnancy complications in Dallas and Tarrant counties by more than 20% in three years. Its work ranges from identifying high-risk pregnancies earlier to connecting women with care and resources before and after they give birth.
Mattie Parker is the mayor of Fort Worth and Dr. Stuart Flynn is the founding dean of TCU’s Burnett School of Medicine and principal investigator for the Maternal Health Accelerator. They joined NTX Now hosts Miranda Suarez and Ron Corning to discuss the initiative and what they hope the grant will help them accomplish.
These interview highlights have been edited for length and clarity. To hear the conversation in full, click the 'listen' button above.
Mayor Parker, you first brought community leaders together around this issue back in 2022. What were you seeing in Fort Worth that convinced you maternal and infant health required this kind of coordinated response? And what can this new $4 million state investment allow you to do that you couldn't do before?
It was hard to believe four years ago we created the Tarrant County Maternal Infant Health Coalition. Dozens of organizations all across Tarrant County and Fort Worth really believed in the work. The Texas Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee had come out with a specific report around pregnancy-related deaths, and knowing that 80% of those deaths could have been prevented across Texas was incredibly troubling to all of us involved.
So fast forward, we worked together as a county for about two years before we actually formed this Texas accelerator that created the opportunity to draw down additional money through Health and Human Services toward this work. We are incredibly thankful and excited to keep at our goal of a 20% reduction in severe obstetric complications across North Texas.
Dr. Flynn, we know that many health reviews have consistently found disparities in maternal mortality and morbidity with Black women disproportionately affected. Will this accelerator program close that racial disparity and how will you know if it's succeeding?
The answer is yes. First of all, thanks to the DFW Hospital Council, we can map 28 different data points in our two counties, and those include where the highest risk patients are. Those tend to be both African American moms and Hispanic [moms]. Now, we can track in those regions where we start to see a change and that change is improvement.
The improvement is a decreased number of transfusions, which make up 75% of our severe obstetric complications, and the other part is postpartum, where we now—with MHMR and other organizations—can actually have one-on-one with nurses, home visits if necessary, and that deals with a lot of things, but just to be very succinct: it deals with high blood pressure issues which can cause strokes and death in postpartum moms, and also deals with their mental well-being.
Mayor Parker, looking forward to the future of this program, is there anything else that you want to tackle? Is there anything else that this program will be able to accomplish?
I think one thing I have to mention is since we started the North Texas Accelerator in 2024, we were on a fast path to raise philanthropic dollars to make this work stand up and be possible. Working alongside both national and local funders, over 14 of those partners, we've raised over $25 million, and we're still climbing.
Candidly, this work will only be successful if we can scale it across all of North Texas and across the United States, and we importantly want to share this information with other partners. There's no reason to hide the ball. We are saving lives of women and children.
Miranda Suarez and Ron Corning are the hosts of KERA's NTX Now. Got a tip? Email Miranda at msuarez@kera.org or Ron at rcorning@kera.org.
KERA News is made possible through the generosity of our members. If you find this reporting valuable, consider making a tax-deductible gift today. Thank you.