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Serenity Jackson pats her 6-week-old baby Samuel on the back, his fuzzed head bobbing as she fills out answers to a baby word scramble. Nearby, a 1-month-old sleeps in a contented squish on his mother’s chest, and older kids weave through the tables with gargantuan squares of cake. It has all the hallmarks of a baby shower, with a few expansive twists. Around 60 families are the center of attention at this party.
Community baby showers are a growing way to envelop new and expectant moms and dads with the encouragement and support organizers hope will empower them to keep themselves and their infants safe. The groaning gift bags they’ll carry home are weighed down with business cards and pamphlets to go with the bibs and Pampers.
A party that fights maternal and infant deaths
For expectant parents who might otherwise not get showered with gifts before their baby arrives, a community baby shower is a way to stock up on supplies. But it’s also a way to deliver information about safe sleep and nutrition, provide a sense of community and make sure families know how to reach out if they struggle with anything from breastfeeding to mental health.
With her background as a licensed clinical social worker, Lesley Gant runs a business that provides home-based support for new families working through mental health issues, struggling to access food or transportation, or figuring out safe sleep arrangements with limited resources.
She doesn’t mean to be subversive. But she’s also a Detroiter who says she’s seen her city get written off so many times — as have many of its families. Pregnancy-related maternal deaths and infant mortality in Detroit’s communities of color far outstrip national averages.
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So Gant organized this community baby shower to sneak some resources into the goody bags, some connection into small talk over a slice of cake. If she can empower these families with knowledge and confidence, maybe she can help them avoid becoming part of those grim statistics.
“We’re here in the community to just love families, to bring them the hope that they need and to fill that (material) void,” Gant said.
Community baby showers are proliferating
Gant is not the only one to use this tactic; community baby showers are reproducing quickly.
Let’s Go Detroit is currently planning a community baby shower for 20 families, whom its website says will receive prepackaged tubs of baby items specific to each family. The Great Start Parent Coalition in Grand Rapids will host a community baby shower later this summer.
The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services hosts virtual baby fairs each year geared toward information delivery from 16 of its programs. New or expecting families can find resources such as breastfeeding support, home visits, lead poisoning prevention and an oral health program.
Many community baby showers are planned, sponsored or at least promoted by health care coalitions or hospitals. Blue Cross Complete of Michigan lists community baby showers on its website; in the last six weeks there were events in Huron, Clinton, Wayne and Muskegon Counties.
It’s an approach on the rise nationally. Community baby showers are helping parents-to-be in Utah, Tennessee, Pennsylvania and Kansas, where some are publicized directly as safe sleep events. Health news site STAT reports that community baby showers in New York “have provided hundreds of expectant families with education on safe sleep, domestic violence, the importance of car seats, prenatal care, and more.”
A legacy mission of outreach in Detroit
Gant’s passion for helping families is also her birthright. Her parents started their own nonprofit: a labor of love, never officially registered and paid for out of their own middle-class paychecks. The family would head out together to Cass Corridor to set up a table with clothes, toiletries and bagged lunches but also “free hugs” and “prayer, if you need it.”
They’d also give out referrals. Her parents targeted the unhoused population, and they tried to stay in contact with the folks who took a shirt or a sandwich to make sure they were getting what they needed. They did it for years.
When Gant’s father passed away unexpectedly in 2015, Gant and her mom tried to carry on, but they felt broken. It was hard to keep up the mission.
When Gant’s mother asked her officially to take over the nonprofit, she took stock of everything she had going on: a business, a marriage and four daughters — already an overfull plate. But Gant couldn’t say no to her mom, and the community she loved.
Soon, Because of His Love Outreach was born anew, a registered 501(c)(3) with a party to plan. They were back, baby.
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Jackson, a client of Gant’s, stands outside on the windy afternoon of the community shower as baby Samuel trains his eyes on a passing cloud.
“I feel really proud of my journey,” she says. She came to the shower to share her positive experience of giving birth with expectant moms who might be feeling scared or alone.
Jackson says the community baby shower brought her connections with friendly people, a fun time and good food, not to mention a helpful stash of diapers and onesies. You never know how many you’re going to need in a month, she says. One night Samuel peed through two shirts, pooped on a third and finally issued the coup de grace when he threw up on a fourth.
Another new mom, Ashley Hemphill, recently gave birth to her fourth baby, a girl named Harmony. If the car seat she just won in the raffle goes beyond the infant stage, she’ll be putting it to good use. Travel systems are expensive.
Hemphill says having an event like this expands her support system and gives her baby items that aren’t in the budget. “As long as we stay together and have events like this, we should be able to survive and make it and have our kids be a better version of us,” she said.
An evidence-based way to share knowledge and build confidence
Community baby showers have not been extensively studied, but some research studies have shown attending one promotes knowledge and confidence for new and expectant parents.
A 2017 study conducted by the Oklahoma State Medical Association found that community baby showers increased participants’ knowledge about infant mortality and that most party-goers intended to share what they had learned.
In Kansas, safe sleep-oriented community baby showers succeeded in imparting high levels of safe sleep knowledge to Black women, who were targeted for attendance by churches, sororities and doctors’ offices.
Later, a 2021 study in the journal Sleep Health that tracked nearly 150 Spanish-speaking Kansas women found participating in a safe sleep community baby shower led to “significant increases in intentions and confidence” to follow the American Academy of Pediatrics Safe Sleep Recommendations.
Support from the city, and love from the community
After the baby shower, Gant returned to the house she jokingly calls her little dungeon since it’s overflowing with piles of donations and baby gear. She won a grant to buy a van to help deliver supplies, but without storage space, it all piles up in her bedroom and back porch.
But the Gants won’t stop stockpiling — not while so many people are in need and they have their own children to teach by example.
Their work has received some attention from the city they love; the health department has offered to help out with another community baby shower this summer. Official support is great — Gant was thrilled to get that call. But what made her truly happy was the email she got the night of the community baby shower from someone expressing their joy at being able to participate in such a fulfilling event.
“It’s just beautiful to see that people are being impacted and feeling loved, and that’s all we really want is for people to feel loved, to be seen and to be heard,” Gant said. “It has been one of the hardest, most challenging and yet most rewarding things of my life.”
Jennifer Brookland covers child welfare for the Detroit Free Press in partnership with Report for America. Make a tax-deductible contribution to support her work at bit.ly/freepRFA. Reach her at jbrookland@freepress.com.
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