During our planning year, we grappled with the question, 'how can we address preterm birth research differently?' Decades of research have been conducted on preterm birth without any major declines in overall rates. We believed that for research to be done differently we needed to partner with people most affected by preterm birth, possibly leading to breakthroughs in addressing this stubborn epidemic, as has been demonstrated with other conditions such as HIV. We believed that people with lived experience should not only collaborate in the formation of research questions but also partner in the decisions of who received funding. 

In 2015 we began partnering with San Francisco's Homeless Prenatal Program and Black Infant Health Program to interview women who had experienced a preterm birth and were from communities most impacted by the preterm birth epidemic. Led by Linda Franck and Monica McLemore, we developed a novel method for identifying and prioritizing researchable questions that reflected parent's uncertainties about the causes and consequences of preterm birth, based on their experiences and values.