Olivia Walton is pledging $100 million over the next five years to tackle maternal mortality through her nonprofit, Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies America.
Walton, the CEO of Ingeborg Investments and a Walmart heiress, said the mission is personal. She told Fortune she ran into serious gaps in maternal care herself when she had her middle child in 2020. She said she did not get the 'postpartum care she needed' in her home state of Arkansas.
That experience led her to the broader picture. Walton said Arkansas has one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the country, around double the national average. She also said that for Black and brown women, the mortality rate is three times higher.
'We have the medicine, we have the science. What we need is the political will,' Walton said. 'We need the awareness.'
Walton and her husband, Tom Walton, are backing a bipartisan nonprofit campaign through Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies America. She said the group is using 'every tool in the toolbox' — from storytelling and advocacy work to coalition-building and catalytic grant-making — to drive change.
As part of the effort, Arkansas and Kansas will each receive $10 million from the foundation to improve maternal health. Walton said the issue could get worse next year because of Medicaid cuts and changes in the way the American Medical Association bills patients.
She said she hopes both sides of the political spectrum can agree on one thing: 'Everybody wants healthy families.'
Walton also said $100 million will not be enough on its own to sustain progress. She called for more midwives and doulas to strengthen the maternal health workforce. She also urged employers to improve pregnancy and postpartum benefits, saying large self-insured companies that improve perinatal benefits see costs come down and outcomes improve.
'Expand your benefits,' Walton 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.'
The numbers come first. A private fortune is stepping into a public-health failure that government has not solved, and the pitch is not charity alone but better outcomes and lower costs. That is how capital works when regulation, billing rules and medical access leave families stranded.
The market has already voted on the logic Walton is describing. Employers that improve benefits see costs come down and outcomes improve, she said. In other words, the same incentives that reward productivity in business can also reward better care when bureaucracy gets out of the way.
