Long-Term Strategy

FLRF operates on the basis of a long-term strategy – backed by sound science, our objective is to ensure breastfeeding becomes the norm and improves the health of mothers and children worldwide.

Our work is anchored to the journey from science to impact and focused in three, interconnected areas across this journey to empower others: knowledge discovery, translation and deployment.

Our mid-term strategy is guided by the aim to help advance breastfeeding knowledge and breastfeeding practices.

Together with a global network of leading experts, we are creating publicly available, sustainable resources and educational tools that help healthcare providers, governments, communities and families overcome obstacles and achieve their breastfeeding goals.

• Research and evidence generation to support discovery and fill critical knowledge gaps. We work to expand existing knowledge about breastfeeding through five endowed, independent and topically focused research centers at academic institutions, and by working with partners to support research projects that grow the evidence base. We aim to break down knowledge silos and facilitate interdisciplinary work and collaboration across disciplines.

• Tools and resources are the products of knowledge translation and improved knowledge management. Alongside our partners, we work to ensure basic research becomes accessible to activate change. We fund projects to create practical tools and resources. We develop and share knowledge and resources that make science and best practices not just accessible, but relevant and applicable. LactaHub, an emerging open-access knowledge platform, offers scientific and evidence-based resources like a human milk banking toolkit; Becoming Breastfeeding Friendly: A Guide to Global Scale Up, and EFBRI – all to help practitioners and policymakers implement breastfeeding strategies that work for their communities.

• Country collaboration and partnership to foster knowledge deployment and activate sustainable change where it is most needed. We seek to empower national leaders to identify and implement context-specific, operational solutions to close the critical gap between breastfeeding policy and implementation. Our innovative policy operationalization approach plus regional capacity building activities aim to provide the tools and sustainable, long-term support to governments to help countries address bottlenecks to implementing breastfeeding policies and programs for impact at scale.

How we and our partners revitalize the journey from science to impact

2015-2022

Since our founding, we have endowed five research centers, each exclusively focused on a specific topic of breastfeeding and breastmilk. To our knowledge they are the first of their kinds in basic research (endocrinology, immunology, microbiome, neurodevelopment) and behavioral economics. We have also funded 20 discrete research and tool development projects. Together these activities reflect our initial strategic focus of generating and improving the knowledge base to drive positive change and increase breastfeeding rates worldwide.

In 2016, we began supporting the development of open access tools for policymakers and practitioners. Our efforts revealed the substantial gap between policy creation and implementation, prompting us in 2019 to seek new ways for how policies can be implemented at scale, with a focus on low resource settings. We also widened our network of partners and launched LactaHub.

Present to near term

As our strategy continues to evolve and mature, we are focusing our efforts on the deployment side of the journey from science to impact, ensuring the current body of knowledge is accessible and actionable for practitioners and experts at the country level. FLRF and its partners are actively invested in addressing why women breastfeed or not and translating the evidence base, for sound planning and implementation.

While we are focusing on this, we are deemphasizing the funding of basic research, yet keeping a commitment to young scientists through the Trainee Expansion Program together with ISRHML and a separate FLRF Fellowship Program together with the Global Human Milk Research Consortium of FLRF endowed research centers. Hence, while we are not considering unsolicited proposals for new research funding at the moment, we remain open to discussing concepts in the area of implementational science and welcome hearing from potential partners to explore fresh ideas.

Future outlook

We expect these operations-based activities will uncover critical knowledge gaps, which will fuel future discovery activities. If you want to learn more about our strategy or how you might join us in the journey from science to impact, please get in touch.