Homeless Prenatal Program Helps Expectant Mothers Deliver Healthy Babies
 our years ago, Vennetta Coffman felt certain she had lost everything —
her home, her children, her sobriety and her future. She was 39 years old, six months
pregnant, in an abusive relationship with her unborn child’s father and sleeping
under a bridge in one of San Francisco’s toughest neighborhoods.
Today, Coffman is the mother of a healthy preschooler, living with him in decent
housing and gainfully employed as a community health worker with the Homeless Prenatal
Program (HPP) — the organization that helped her turn her life around and give her
son Dillinjer an even start in life.
Funded in part by a $120,000 grant from TCWF, HPP’s main goal is to ensure that at
least 80 percent of the homeless pregnant women it serves deliver babies of at least
normal birthweight, and that 70 percent of the deliveries show no evidence of substance
abuse by the mothers.
Latest reports indicate that HPP is not only meeting but exceeding this goal: 97
percent of HPP births in the first half of 1999 were of normal birthweight or heavier and
84 percent of the babies were drug free.
"HPP is one of the key strands in San Francisco’s safety net, benefiting one
of the city’s most vulnerable and neglected populations," said TCWF Program
Officer Fatima Angeles. "This grant is intended to help the agency grow and do an
even better job of improving the health of this underserved population."
The program, which serves about 950 families a year in San Francisco’s South of
Market and Tenderloin neighborhoods, provides a full range of services: prenatal education
and health care, home visits, parent education and case management.
   Offered
in both English and Spanish, prenatal instruction focuses on such topics as human growth
and development, prenatal care, and labor and delivery, while parenting classes help new
mothers, many of whom were not well parented themselves, learn child-rearing skills that
will allow their children to grow up healthy.
HPP also assists clients in finding transitional or permanent shelter, combating
substance abuse and enrolling in job-training programs — whatever it takes to get
them on their feet.
"Our job is to help women have healthy babies," said Executive Director
Martha Ryan, a nurse practitioner who works directly with HPP clients. "To be born
healthy makes a tremendous difference in anyone’s future. It’s hard enough for a
child born into poverty to an at-risk mother, but if the baby is healthy and the mom is on
the right road, the future becomes a lot brighter."
Vennetta Coffman couldn’t agree more. "My young son’s life will be
different because of my involvement with HPP. My boy is healthy. I have a job and
permanent housing. We’re not on welfare anymore. I’m back in touch with my older
children, and I’m even able to give something back to society."
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