Student Spotlight: How is Aarin Urevig Informing Breastfeeding Practices Through Research and Community Engagement?

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#UMNMCH student Aarin Urevig (MPH 2025) reflects on her journey to Maternal and Child Health, her deployment with the Minnesota Breastfeeding Coalition and the Minnesota Department of Health, and her work analyzing breastfeeding support, perceived unfair practices, and barriers for Black women in urban communities. With a background in public health nursing, lactation support, and out-of-hospital labor and delivery, Aarin–a Family Home Visiting Nurse–is committed to bridging research and workforce development to improve access to perinatal care and lactation services.

Headshot of Aarin Urevig

Path to the UMN MPH in MCH Program 

My healthcare journey began as an in-home personal care assistant (PCA), supporting children and youth with special health care needs (CYSHCN) in the Twin Cities Area. I worked as a PCA throughout my undergraduate studies and continued after being accepted into a Bachelor of Science in Nursing (BSN) program. During my clinical rotations, I discovered a passion for Maternal and Child Health (MCH), which inspired me to seek a role supporting families during the perinatal period.

My introduction to the maternal and child health field expanded when I became a birth assistant, prenatal educator, and home visitor at a free-standing birth center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Through this work, I saw firsthand how personalized, community-based care can significantly impact families’ experiences during pregnancy and birth. I witnessed the empowering effects of supportive environments while also recognizing the challenges families faced, including gaps in access to care, inconsistent breastfeeding support, and societal obstacles that often hindered their ability to receive essential resources.

Motivated to address these differences in experiences, I pursued a career in Family Home Visiting within a local public health department. In this role, I have the privilege of working alongside prenatal and postpartum families, guiding them through complex healthcare systems and ensuring they receive community specific perinatal support. My dual perspective as a registered nurse (RN) and public health nurse (PHN) has strengthened my commitment to both individual care and broader public health initiatives. Recognizing the pressing need for accessible lactation support, I also became a Certified Lactation Counselor (CLC), further equipping myself to assist families in achieving their infant feeding goals.

These experiences ultimately led me to pursue a Master of Public Health in MCH at the University of Minnesota. I am dedicated to moving beyond individual-level care to address the larger obstacles that prevent perinatal and lactation support. My goal is to not only support families directly but to contribute to shaping policies and programs that make high-quality care more available to all.

Deployment Timeline

In the Summer of 2023, a collaboration began between Brighter Health MN, an organization dedicated to community development, urban policy, and health literacy improvement partnered with Minnesota Breastfeeding Coalition (MBC), a statewide network dedicated to creating environments where breastfeeding is valued and supported. With technical assistance from the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH), which provides public health expertise and resources, they conducted focus groups with Black women in urban communities to explore their perspectives on donor milk use and accessibility. These conversations delved into the practical, cultural, and systemic factors that shape families’ infant feeding choices.

As I sifted through the transcripts, I looked for both explicity themes, such as direct mentions of donor milk access. and underlying narratives about the systemic challenges in perinatal care. This analytical process helped highlight not just what families were saying, but also the broader structural and cultural factors influencing their experiences. -Quote by Aarin Urevig

In September 2023, I joined the research team as a qualitative analyst under the mentorship of my preceptor, Marcia McCoy, a research scientist with MDH’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) and an alumna of UMN’s MPH program. My role involved carefully reviewing the focus group interviews and survey responses, and categorizing insights into key themes. I developed coding frameworks based on recurring patterns to ensure consistency and reliability in data interpretation. As I sifted through the transcripts, I looked for both explicit themes, such as direct mentions of donor milk access, and underlying narratives about challenges in perinatal care. This analytical process helped highlight not just what families were saying, but also the large-scale factors influencing their experiences. As I coded the data, valuable insights extended beyond donor milk usage- families shared poor experiences of hospital-based lactation care, unfair practices, and challenges navigating perinatal support systems. These narratives highlighted how barriers to donor milk access are often tied to broader factors in breastfeeding support.

The intersection of religious beliefs and donor milk usage was a key theme that emerged in the focus groups, highlighting the importance of community-specific lactation support in perinatal settings. One of the most significant outcomes of this research was the first U.S. Islamic fatwa on donor milk usage, issued on November 16, 2023, by the Minnesota Islamic Council. This fatwa clarified religious teachings and encouraged Muslim families to use pasteurized donor human milk when a mother’s own milk is not available or sufficient (Schaub, 2023). Organizations across Minnesota, including Brighter Health MN and the MBC, collaborated with Muslim leaders and scholars to make this historic guidance possible.

With these findings taking shape, I collaborated with the team to develop materials for two professional conferences. In early October 2024, we presented at the Minnesota Breastfeeding Coalition (MBC) Conference, where we shared community perspectives on donor milk and hospital lactation care to a broad audience including hospital staff, NICU nurses, neonatologists, doulas, and providers. Later that month, we presented findings on the role of perceived unfair practices in shaping infant feeding choices at the American Public Health Association (APHA) Annual Meeting and Expo. These conferences provided valuable opportunities to bring our research to public health professionals and lactation advocates working toward improving maternal health.

After these presentations, we spent Winter 2024 transforming our research by incorporating our findings into a manuscript. In February 2025, we submitted our manuscript for peer review in the Journal of Human Lactation. The process of turning focus group data into a research paper further reinforced how community voices and lived experiences can shape maternal health research.

Looking Ahead

To create a sustained impact, we are focusing on outreach to nonprofits, hospitals, and public health agencies to ensure this research informs practice and policy. Community health programs like WIC and Family Home Visiting offer opportunities to integrate our findings into workforce training and maternal health initiatives. -Quote by Aarin Urevig

Publishing our findings in the Journal of Human Lactation is just the beginning. To create a sustained impact, we are focusing on outreach to nonprofits, hospitals, and public health agencies to ensure this research informs practice and policy. By engaging with community and hospital systems we hope to improve lactation support and address differences in prevalence of positive breastfeeding care. Community health programs like WIC and Family Home Visiting offer opportunities to integrate our findings into workforce training and maternal health initiatives. Additionally, midwives, doulas, and lactation professionals play a key role in expanding donor milk access and community-specific breastfeeding support outside of hospital settings. The goal is not just to share research but to ignite change ensuring that the experiences of Black mothers inform the policies, training, and systems that shape perinatal care.

SOURCES/REFERENCES 

BIO

Aarin Urevig is a second-year MCH MPH student. She earned her Bachelor of Science from Herzing University and is also a Certified Lactation Counselor. She has served in the Army National Guard for 12 years, beginning as a Food Service Specialist and advancing to her current role as a Food Advisor, where she holds the rank of Chief Warrant Officer.

Interested in learning more about getting a degree in MCH? Visit our MCH Program page for more information.

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