The Bridge Directory

Co-founder Emilie Rodriguez recently served on the review committee for the 2025 Award to Enhance the Perinatal Care Ecosystem ($50K) from the Center for the Transition to Parenthood CTtP), a research-to-practice center at Columbia University advancing whole-person, two-generation health.

This year’s 128 applications showcased extraordinary creativity, rigor, and commitment to equity across research and community practice. The projects shared reaffirm the field’s collective energy toward transforming the perinatal care ecosystem.

Congratulations to this year’s awardees:
🩵 Brittany Renee Neal, LCSW, PhD(c) – Pregnancy & Resiliency Early Support Services (PRESS)
💙 Lenore Renee Jarvis, MD, MEd, FAAP – Targeted Support for Perinatal Mood and Anxiety Disorders

And deep appreciation to all who applied; their work reflects the depth and diversity of innovation shaping family well-being during the transition to parenthood.

We are deeply devastated by the illegal cancellation of our funding under the Trump administration, which halts our critical work on the NY Community-Hospital-Academic Maternal Health Equity Partnerships (NY-CHAMP) grant. This seven-year NIH-funded project, which was only 1.5 years in, is a partnership between Columbia University, Cornell, NY Presbyterian, and community based organizations. This decision, retaliatory in nature, stems from Columbia’s (previous) support/“allowance” of students and activists protesting and advocating against the genocide in Palestine and its stances in many other intersecting issues that impact marginalized and targeted communities.

The Bridge Directory has been at the forefront of developing a community-centered research, training, and engagement program aimed at addressing severe maternal morbidity (SMM) and mortality (MM). Our work in co-designing scalable, anti-racist, patient empowerment-focused strategies to reduce SMM and MM in NYC and beyond is essential to the fight for maternal health equity.

Our role in this innovative multi-sector partnership model was not just about research; it was about breaking down silos and providing a foundation for sustainable cultural change in maternal health. Through this project, The Bridge was set to develop a curriculum grounded in our model and standards of care, and host both in-person and online training sessions between patients and providers.

This is not just an attack on research—it’s an attack on freedom of speech and the right to protest. The ability to speak out against injustice, to protest against oppression, and to advocate for change is fundamental to a healthy democracy. The Bridge believes in the power of protest to highlight and challenge systems of power and oppression. By punishing those who use their voices for justice, this administration is attempting to silence the very mechanisms of change that are needed to confront the deep-rooted inequities in our society.

This retaliation against those advocating for justice is a direct attack on the communities we serve. But we will not be deterred. The fight for racial and reproductive justice is more critical than ever.