Embrace

Mission

Embrace's mission is to advance maternal and child health by delivering innovative solutions to the world's most vulnerable populations.

Background

Twenty million low birth weight and premature babies are born each year worldwide, primarily in developing countries, often in areas that don't have access to innovations in modern medicine.

One of the biggest problems these babies face is hypothermia: they are not able to regulate their own body temperature, and therefore cannot stay warm. In fact, room temperature for these small infants feels freezing cold. 4 million babies die within their first month of life. Those that do survive often develop life-long health problems such as early onset of diabetes, heart disease, and low IQ. By providing affordable and accessible solutions to prevent hypothermia, Embrace impacts the lives of babies all over the world.

Embrace catalyzes the creation of new products (such as their innovative, low-cost infant warmer) with strong potential to improve health outcomes in developing countries, and then works to get those products directly to the people who need them most. Their ultimate goal is to ensure that every woman and child has an equal chance for a healthy life.

Full Circle Fund Role

The Full Circle Fund project focuses on developing a plan to help Embrace achieve its goal of improving health outcomes. Full Circle Fund members will assist Embrace with performing market research to assess their needs and spotlight related products and services.

In order to help Embrace define their measures of success, members will layer in diverse perspectives, test new ideas, conduct interviews and synthesize findings; perform market research; review case studies; and lead focus groups. Finally, members will make recommendations and outline the organization's next steps.

NAME: Embrace
ORGANIZATION LEADER:
Erin O'Donohue
Executive Director
LOCATION: San Francisco
WEB: embraceglobal.org
GRANT TERM: 2012-2013
TEAM LEAD: Ashley Rodwick and Sarah Wigglesworth

"For us, working with Full Circle Fund's members is a perfect marriage. They have exactly what we need, expertise in consulting, and are really trying to help get Embrace to where we need to be for our next phase."

Priya Mistry

Associate Director - Embrace