“Supporting the health of mom and baby requires a whole ecosystem, and that’s why we’ve envisioned this navigator as a hub and spoke model. The navigator could be a connective tissue between programs, bringing people and resources together in a way that offers a better experience and ultimately better outcomes for the family.”
-Maya Mechenbier, Innovation & Incubation Fellow, Beeck Center
Interview with Maya Mechenbier
An Innovation & Incubation Fellow at the Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation at Georgetown University, Maya Mechenbier leads research on implementing human-centered design to help teen and college-aged mothers continue their education and pursue meaningful careers.
She previously led a team at the U.S. Digital Service focused on helping low-income mothers and other caregivers more easily obtain such federally funded benefits as SNAP, WIC, and child care subsidies — with the goal of improving customer experience, building trust, and improving maternal mental health through reducing administrative burdens. A passionate advocate for paid family leave, Mechenbier shared her thoughts on the value of paid family leave and plans for a pilot program to make benefits in New Jersey more accessible.
What are the benefits of paid family leave?
The most obvious benefits are that birthing parents are provided with the time and space to physically, emotionally, and mentally recover from pregnancy and labor and delivery. Another benefit is that it gives parents time with their baby to provide nurturing and build the relational health that’s important for child development.
Traditionally, we focus on a woman’s physical recovery after giving birth. Perhaps it’s 8 weeks after a C-section or 6 weeks after a vaginal delivery. But the other partner having that time off is equally critical for the health and sustainability of a household that now includes a new baby. That other partner is supporting the parent who gave birth and supporting the child. They’re learning how to take care of the child. And if one partner isn’t there during those initial few months, the other partner can become the de facto standard caregiver, and it’s very difficult to change that dynamic once it’s established.
How does the work you did on designing a national strategy for maternal mental health tie to paid family leave?
Twenty-three percent of preventable pregnancy-related deaths in this country are due to mental health and substance use disorder. If we think about mental health and what we could do to address that large category of preventable deaths, paid leave is a no-brainer — giving more families time and space to mentally and emotionally recover and spend time with their babies.
We all know that babies don’t sleep until several months into the parenting journey. We also know that a mom or caregiver experiencing broken sleep for months on end will almost certainly develop a mental health condition. Any human would. Having these mothers go back to work immediately or a few weeks after giving birth makes no sense. Paid leave gives them a chance to seek resources or services that could help them with parenting. If you’re back at work in an office, or working 2 jobs, or shift work that doesn’t allow you the time and space to make a phone call or an appointment, it may be hard to get whatever support you need.
Should our efforts focus on improving state paid family leave programs or getting a federal program in place that would universalize it?
We have an interesting opportunity over the next 4 years to innovate and demonstrate success at the state and local level throughout this country where there’s political will and executive sponsorship to do that. I believe that over the next 4 years we can do that in states like New Jersey. We can show what it means to have high-quality service delivery for families that need access to benefits, and when we get an opportunity in Congress to reevaluate federal programs such as affordable child care, paid family leave, or universal pre-K, we’ll have a robust set of proof of concept demonstrations at the state and local level that we can use to build the evidence base for when we have developed that same political will at the federal level.
Tell us about the pilot program you’re working on to make it easier for parents to obtain paid family leave in New Jersey.
I’m a consultant with New Practice Lab, part of New America Foundation, and we’re considering a pilot program to test a navigator model with families to help them learn about, apply for, and receive paid family leave benefits in New Jersey. We’re working in partnership with the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development, which administers the state’s Family Leave Insurance program.
Paid leave is a different type of benefit than such federally funded programs as SNAP, WIC, housing vouchers, or child care subsidies. Paid leave requires more strategizing around different scenarios. When do you want to start your paid leave? Do you have other children? Is your partner taking leave? Are there other caregivers in the home? Each person’s situation is different, and having a navigator help you think through the pros and cons of various approaches could be very helpful. We hope navigators will help families with those decisions. That’s something we want to test in this pilot.
We’re focusing on the Trenton community, which has some of the most challenging maternal health statistics but also has a robust civil society and community-based organization stakeholder network. We want to deploy these navigators in partnership with community-based organizations that have deep ties to the families we’re trying to reach.
Supporting the health of mom and baby requires a whole ecosystem, and that’s why we’ve envisioned this navigator as a hub and spoke model. The navigator could be a connective tissue between programs, bringing people and resources together in a way that offers a better experience and ultimately better outcomes for the family.
What led you to consider designing a pilot program on paid family leave?
With paid family leave, similarly to other benefit programs, there’s a gap between families that are eligible for the benefit and families that are accessing the benefit. Part of the reason is because many benefits processes require a lot of paperwork. And the application questions can be confusing at times because government agencies administering the programs haven’t evaluated the wording to make sure it’s easy to comprehend.
Our team is using a human-centered design focus and speaking with families to learn how to center their experience and needs. This can help us make the process of signing up for paid family leave more seamless and accessible from the families’ perspective. One takeaway was hearing from families that they wanted somebody to help guide them through this process. Most families don’t want an AI chatbot. They want to be able to pick up the phone and talk to a person about questions they have about the application or have someone sit with them and walk them through the application. From that feedback, we constructed the concept of the navigator. We really see families as co-designers of these interventions; their perspective is something we’ll collect continuously over the course of the pilot.
In addition to input from families, we’ll seek input from staff administering the benefit to make sure any intervention also works for them systemically. If something doesn’t work for the folks implementing the benefit, it won’t work for the whole service delivery journey. Collecting feedback on the lived experience of families and staff is integrated into how we deploy and evaluate a pilot and our consideration around recommending that the pilot become a long-term program.
How will you help make the process equitable and user-friendly for young or first-time parents?
One principle our team holds is that if you design an application form for the most complex case, or the parent who has the lowest English literacy level, or the young parent who may need very simple, user-friendly language as part of the form, then you’re creating an application that’s better for the whole population. Who wants to read a form with long, complicated words and questions? The simpler, the better. When we speak to families and staff, we’re trying to get the perspective of folks who may have the toughest time going through the process so we can design something geared toward them, with the understanding that everyone will benefit.
Are there any successful navigator programs you’re using as a model?
There was a navigator program I led when I was in the federal government. We launched maternal health and early childhood programs focused on helping low-income families access benefits. One was a peer navigator program intended to help families access such federally funded benefits as Medicaid, WIC, child care, and other community supports and resources.
We launched this as a pilot in 6 locations across the country and found it did increase knowledge and access awareness of benefits programs, and people felt more supported. The peer navigators came from community-based organizations, and a lot of that experience is informing the paid leave navigator program we’re doing in New Jersey. Some community-based organizations already have robust workforces of community health workers who provide culturally congruent care to their communities and are largely a workforce of women of color.
Navigator programs aren’t only a way to support families. They’re also a potential career path for this workforce. When we did research in Trenton, we learned there’s an existing workforce in the community helping folks sign up for various benefits and they’re eager to learn more about paid family leave. They know it’s a need in the community and want to be trained on the paid family leave navigator work so they can offer it to the community. They also see that increasing skills is part of their own career trajectory.
What other interventions, practices, or policies should we be thinking about to support new parents?
Affordable child care is critical. Without child care, you can’t look for a job, let alone secure a job. You can get most people on Medicaid, SNAP, or WIC if they can get through the application process and if they want it. But with child care and housing, those are 2 things where there are supply problems.
We hear from folks who work overnight shifts who can’t find child care for their kids. And we speak to student parents trying to work all day and go to community college at night and don’t know what to do with their kids after 5 p.m. because all the daycare centers are closed. How can you get your degree? We make it impossible for people. It would be helpful if state and local governments could work with some of those child care providers to understand what’s preventing them from opening a space to fulfill these and other child care needs. We’ve heard from providers, “We want to be able to serve kids with autism. We want to be able to serve special needs kids. We want to be able to offer support to families in the community that need subsidies and have overnight shifts or have weird hours.” And they’re not able to do that because the support isn’t there from local government.
On the real estate issue, it’s low-hanging fruit to look around at all this empty office space and identify areas that could be good for child care and work with folks to incentivize them to use that space for that.
State and local governments can do a lot to work with child care entrepreneurs, to expand the child care workforce and identify real estate options in a community that could work for a child care center, to make licensing, training, and credentialing more transparent and easier to access for people who want to start child care sites.