Walmart heiress Olivia Walton is pledging a part of her family’s multibillion-dollar fortune to tackle the maternal health crisis affecting women across the U.S. The CEO of Ingeborg Investments founded her nonprofit Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies America in April, dedicating $100 million over the next five years to cut the country’s maternal mortality rate in half.
Her mission is deeply personal: As a mother of three young kids, she ran into serious gaps in maternal care herself, despite having access to the resources of a family worth an estimated $500 billion.
“It’s personal,” Walton told leadership editor and summit cochair Claire Zillman onstage at Fortune’s annual Most Powerful Women conference in Santa Barbara, Calif., on Monday. “I went through it myself, and I saw that even with all my resources, with my family, with my education, it was still really hard.”
When Walton had her middle child in 2020, she said that she didn’t get the “postpartum care she needed” from facilities in her home state of Arkansas. And when she took a step back to look at the full picture, she quickly recognized other women in her state were suffering, too. Arkansas has one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the country, Walton noted, which is around double the national average.
“Women are dying in Arkansas from complications from giving birth at the same rate they are in Cuba. And don’t forget—never forget—that for Black and brown women, the mortality rate is three times higher,” Walton said. “We have the medicine, we have the science. What we need is the political will. We need the awareness.”
Now she and her husband, Tom Walton, are hoping to turn awareness into action with their bipartisan nonprofit campaign. Through Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies America, they’re using “every tool in the toolbox” to drive change—from storytelling and advocacy work, to coalition-building and catalytic grant-making. Arkansas and Kansas will each receive $10 million from the foundation to improve their maternal health. The issue could worsen as we head into the next year, due to Medicaid cuts and changes in the way the American Medical Association bills patients, Walton said. But she said she has hope people on both sides of the political spectrum can agree on one thing when it comes to maternal health care: “Everybody wants healthy families.”
However, a $100 million pledge isn’t enough to sustain that progress on its own. Walton stressed the importance of bolstering the maternal health workforce with more midwives and doulas. And beyond getting more workers into the industry, she called on employers to improve their pregnancy and postpartum benefits. After all, large, self-insured companies that improve their perinatal benefits see their costs come down and outcomes improve, Walton said.
“Expand your benefits,” the philanthropist said. “Take better care of moms, not because it’s the right thing to do, but because it’s usually the smart thing to do for your business.”