A Community of Committed Men:

Background: Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity Incorporated, is a private, not-for-profit organization that has over 150,000 members, with approximately 721 undergraduate and alumni chapters in every state of the United States, and international chapters in the United Kingdom, Bermuda, Germany, Korea, Japan, Virgin Islands, and South Africa. On a national level, Kappa is organized into twelve Provinces across the country.  Each Province has an annual meeting where health screenings are conducted and bi-annually, the National Conclave meeting is attended by members from all twelve provinces; on average 4,000-5,000 members annually attend.  The Fraternity conducts several community outreach programs. Healthy Kappas, Healthy Communities (HK/HC) is the national health & wellness initiative. Chronic conditions exert a major burden on the quality of life and life expectancy of all Americans. This is particularly true for vulnerable populations, such as those with a history of disparities in care, lack of knowledge about chronic diseases or how to manage them, poor access to health services, or other causes for suboptimal outcomes. The Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity is working through its membership to promote safe sleep practices among parents and caregivers—particularly fathers—in an effort to reduce the risk of sudden unexpected infant death. The membership as been charged with communicating the important role men have in being able to teach other men such as fathers, grandfathers, uncles, brothers, and other community stakeholders about the ways to reduce SIDS and other sleep-related causes of infant death.   

Program background: The Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity is working through its membership to promote safe Infant sleep practices among parents, caregivers and particularly fathers in an effort to reduce the risk of sudden unexpected infant death focusing on the African American Communities. This session will highlight the details of the initiative focusing on the development of this national partnerships and its effort to achieve equity in birth outcomes throughout the United States.

Evaluation Methods and Results: The broad goals of the Initiative are to: 1. Collaborate on efforts to educate Kappa membership in an effort to build alliances within communities to assist in education and awareness activities around SIDS and other sleep-related causes of infant death. 2.  Communicate the important role men have in being able to teach other men such as fathers, grandfathers, uncles, brothers, and other community stakeholders about the ways to reduce SIDS and other sleep-related causes of infant death   Qualatative and quanatative data is currently being collected in preparing publish results.

Conclusions:  Through a series of discussion focused on lessons learned, share wisdom that can be passed on to others in an effort to reduce infant mortality and improve perinatal outcomes.

Implications for research and/or practice: One challenge in promoting the latest evidence-based safe sleep recommendations is their increased complexity over the original “Back to Sleep” campaign message, which focused solely on infant sleep position. The current AAP guidance on a safe sleep environment for infants includes eleven recommendations, including breastfeeding for as long as possible, working wilth males organizational to champion these policies, practices can be  difficulty task.