$20 million for mothers: Olivia Walton brings her maternal health crusade home
Olivia Walton has a simple way of explaining why she has made the safety of American mothers the defining cause of her philanthropy. “It was more dangerous for me to give birth to my children than it was for my mother to give birth to me in the 1980s,” she said last month. “That is inexcusable, and it is fixable.”
Last week in Bentonville, she put a fresh $20 million behind that conviction. Standing onstage at Heartland Forward’s annual Heartland Summit alongside Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a Republican, and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, Walton announced that Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies America, the national nonprofit she founded this year, will commit $10 million to each state over five years.
The grants are the organization’s first state-level investments, and they mark the opening move in what may be the most ambitious private effort ever mounted against maternal death in the United States.
The Arkansas grant lands close to home.
Walton lives in Bentonville with her husband, Tom Walton, a grandson of Walmart founder Sam Walton, and their three children, all born within the past eight years.
“I live in a state with the worst maternal mortality in the country,” she has said.
Arkansas records 35.3 maternal deaths for every 100,000 births, nearly half of its 75 counties are maternity-care deserts, and roughly 78,000 women of childbearing age have no birthing hospital or obstetrician in their county.
Poor pregnancy outcomes are estimated to cost the state $1.8 billion a year.
Kentucky, where nearly half of counties also lack maternity care and most rural women live more than 30 minutes from a birthing hospital, faces a similar picture.
The money will follow the states’ lead. Over five years, it will help Arkansas and Kentucky expand the ranks of midwives, doulas, community health workers and other maternal health professionals; strengthen data and quality-improvement work through systems such as the federal Perinatal Improvement Collaborative; widen access to home visiting during pregnancy and after birth; and extend postpartum care, including mental health support.
The postpartum emphasis is deliberate. Two-thirds of maternal deaths occur in the year after delivery, and in Arkansas the share is 71 percent, with half of the state’s maternal deaths coming between six weeks and a full year after a baby arrives, long after the traditional final checkup.
“States know their communities best, and we can help bring additional resources, partners, and support to build on what’s already working,” Walton said. “We’re proud to start from the Heartland in Arkansas and Kentucky and show what this kind of partnership can make possible.”
The two state grants are drawn from a far larger pledge. On Sept. 10, Olivia and Tom Walton committed an initial $100 million over five years to Healthy Moms, Healthy Babies America, money that will fund state matching grants, high-impact partnerships, and the infrastructure needed to bring proven interventions to scale.
The organization’s leaders have described it as perhaps the single largest private investment ever made to cut maternal mortality in the United States. The goal is to halve the national maternal death rate by 2031, a target that hinges on a finding Walton repeats often: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 87 percent of pregnancy-related deaths are preventable.
Walton’s approach reflects both her pragmatism and her years in a newsroom. After earning degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and the London School of Economics, she built a career in journalism, anchoring for Bloomberg Television in New York and London and later reporting as a business correspondent for NBC News and MSNBC.
That early life in storytelling still shapes how she works, and she speaks about the crisis with a reporter’s appetite for evidence and a taste for big ideas.
“You can’t fix what you can’t measure,” she said. She sees philanthropy as the risk capital that lets governments act: “Taking on risk and going first is a great use of philanthropic capital,” she said, adding that the aim is “to prove that this works and then have state funding take it over.”
Her pitch is resolutely bipartisan.
“I’ve got blue-state solutions of what works, red-state solutions of what works, and purple-state solutions of what works,” she said.
The campaign launched on Mother’s Day on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” with Walton seated beside Sanders and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat.
She built the organization with Cara Osborne, a Kentucky-born nurse midwife with a doctorate from Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, who leads the Maternal and Child Health Center for Policy and Practice that Walton helped launch at Heartland Forward in 2025.
The national team now includes executive director Robin Reck and president and chief medical officer Dr. Neel Shah.
The $100 million commitment culminates several years of quieter, closer-to-home giving. Through her personal philanthropy, Walton has worked on three fronts: elevating the arts, improving outcomes for Arkansas mothers, and supporting policies that strengthen families and expand economic security for women.
Much of her maternal health work ran through Ingeborg Initiatives, the social impact platform she named for her maternal grandmother and devoted to empowering mothers in Arkansas.
In 2024, Ingeborg provided a $250,000 seed grant to establish the Doula Alliance of Arkansas, a partnership between doulas and physicians meant to support mothers through pregnancy and the postpartum period.
In 2025, it partnered with Royal Philips to give every expectant parent in Arkansas free access to state-specific content in the Philips Avent Pregnancy+ app, making Arkansas the first state to offer it through private funding.
Her companion firm, Ingeborg Investments, founded in 2017, carries the same mission into the marketplace, backing women-led startups and female fund managers as a way to widen economic opportunity for women. In 2025, that blend of civic purpose and business acumen earned her a place in the Aspen Institute’s class of Henry Crown Fellows.
If maternal health is the cause she has made her own, the arts are the cause she grew up in. Walton was raised in Manhattan, a few blocks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and did her homework in the gallery of her mother, the New York art dealer Monique Knowlton, a champion of women artists.
She joined the board of Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in 2019 and in 2021 succeeded founder Alice Walton as its chair. She helped found the Momentary, the museum’s contemporary arts satellite, and still sits on its council.
With Tom and his brother Steuart Walton, she co-founded OZ Art NWA, whose vision she leads, filling parks, trails, and streets across Northwest Arkansas with art people encounter in everyday life.
The three also co-founded the Heartland Summit itself, part of a broader push to bring economic opportunity and social progress to the middle of the country.
Last year, as Crystal Bridges prepared to open its 114,000-square-foot expansion, she and Tom donated 18 major works, all by women artists, including Yayoi Kusama’s “Narcissus Garden” and Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s “Mama, Mummy and Mamma (Predecessors #2),” in her mother’s memory.
Together with a gift from collectors Candace and Michael Humphreys, it was described as the largest gift since the museum opened. The couple has also supported broader community causes, including a $1 million statewide fund launched in 2021 for organizations serving LGBTQ Arkansans.
Through it all runs a single thread, one Walton has distilled into a kind of creed. “If you take care of mom, she’ll take care of everything else,” she said.
“Healthy moms lead to healthy families. Healthy families lead to healthy communities. Healthy communities lead to a healthy economy.”
With the first $20 million now committed, Arkansas and Kentucky will be the proving ground for whether that belief, backed by Walton family resources and state partnership, can change the odds for the next generation of American mothers.