Breastfeeding Family Friendly Community

The Breastfeeding Family Friendly Communities (BFFC) initiative is a community-wide program to impact Health Equity, as supported by the World Health Organization guidelines to work with communities to improve breastfeeding support services. The foundation of the initiative is the Ten Steps to a Breastfeeding Family Friendly Community (Ten Steps). Rather than providing lactation support directly to families, the Ten Steps Global Criteria with Approaches and Measures provide a Framework for local advocates to support the systems in the community in which families interact, such as the local hospital and healthcare community; WIC; Health Department; Chamber of Commerce and business owners; and childcare programs and school systems from birth to post-secondary. Each one of our partner communities, municipalities, cities, or towns works to bring together local stakeholders from diverse backgrounds, community groups, organizations, agencies, and institutions. 

Stakeholders include everyone in the community! Families are stakeholders, too! Many families initiate breastfeeding in the hospital or birth center and want to continue to breastfeed after leaving the hospital. Yet, most discontinue breastfeeding in the first week or two after their infant’s birth. Families cite negative attitudes about breastfeeding and lack of safe, welcoming places to feed their infants in the community as reasons to discontinue. We all have a role in supporting families that choose to breastfeed.

Why families stop before they meant to

Most parents in the United States start out feeding human milk. Most stop earlier than they intended. Roughly three in five who stop breastfeeding do so before they planned to, and the reasons are rarely about knowledge or effort.

This is not an individual failure. It is a systems failure, produced by the lack of paid family leave, by workplaces with nowhere private to express milk, by limited access to culturally concordant care, by structural racism, and by aggressive marketing of infant formula. A parent can leave the hospital fully supported and still stop within weeks, because the places where she spends her days were not built for her to continue.

That is what the Ten Steps are for. They do not ask families to try harder. They ask a community to change the conditions.

What is our lens?

Equity is the lens through which we work! And universal access is the ground it stands on: every BFFC program, training, and resource is open to everyone. No family or organization is denied anything we offer on the basis of race, color, ethnicity, national origin, immigration status, religion or creed, age, sex, pregnancy or lactation status, sexual orientation, gender identity, family structure, primary language, ability or disability, veteran or military status, or socio-economic status; an equity lens simply means we work hardest to make sure open doors are actually reachable by all. Breastfeeding/chestfeeding/human milk feeding offers the best start for an infant, providing needed immunological benefits for the infant’s still-not-mature immune system; protection from upper respiratory illnesses, ear infections, gastro-intestinal illnesses, such as, diarrhea or preterm necrotizing enterocolitis, and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome; and, of course, nutrition. Breastfeeding supports optimal development, and this best start continues beyond the one-to-two year age. In fact, these important benefits continue as long as the child is nursing. The benefits are not limited to the breastfeeding infant; there are physical and mental health benefits for the parent and family, too. Supporting a breastfeeding family friendly community really supports a healthier community!

These amazing benefits are available to all nursing infants; however, the support that families need to initiate and sustain lactation is not equitable. Black, Brown, and Indigenous families often receive less information and support starting in pregnancy and going through the birth of their infants and into the weeks and months after birth and beyond. Yet, we know that Black, Brown, and Indigenous families want to breastfeed, and their infants need this vital infant feeding for an optimal start!

We seek to build awareness within our communities of these inequities and ways to support our families to provide the optimal start and continued health for infants and their family, so that we can build a just, equitable, and supportive community. The initiative touches all the areas, all the places, in our community where families live, work, grow, and play. All of us are stakeholders in the health and well-being of our families. We look forward to working with you to build a “breastfeeding family friendly community” to ensure that families are able to provide the optimal start for their infants. 

Every way of feeding a baby

We honor all methods of providing human milk: breastfeeding, chestfeeding, bottle feeding expressed milk, donor human milk, and feeding through medical devices. While our work centers human milk feeding, we also support families who use formula, because informed choice and systemic barriers have to be acknowledged together.

Success is defined by each family’s own needs and goals. A parent who planned to feed for six weeks and did so has succeeded. Our work is to make sure that what stops a family is never the community around them.

Join us!

For more information about joining the Breastfeeding Family Friendly Community initiative, reach out through our contact form or call 919-622-8787.