The Program That Proves Funded 1:1 Support Actually Works

I want to tell you about a program in Detroit that has nothing to do with autism, and everything to do with it.

In 2008, four competing Detroit-area health systems — organizations that would ordinarily be rivals — came together and formed a joint task force to address the city's infant mortality rate. What came out of it was the WIN Network: Detroit, a program pairing group prenatal care with Community Health Workers who provide sustained, one-on-one support to at-risk pregnant women.

Here's the origin story, and it should sound familiar: WIN Network's founders discovered roughly a hundred existing maternal health programs that were at risk of losing funding, not because they didn't work, but because the women they were designed for couldn't find them. The fix wasn't a new clinical intervention. It was a funded human being, trained and paid, whose entire job was connecting women to care that already existed and helping them stay connected to it.

The results are published and real: a study comparing 254 WIN Network participants to over 12,000 controls found significantly lower odds of NICU admission and longer, healthier pregnancies. Early cohorts recorded zero infant deaths.

Sit with what that program actually proves. It proves that a funded connector role — not a new program, not a new building, just a paid person doing sustained relationship-based navigation — measurably changes outcomes for a population the existing system was failing to reach. It proves that competing institutions will collaborate when the shared stake is made visible enough. And it was funded by a coalition that included the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Kresge Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and others — funders with real reach beyond maternal health specifically.

Every time someone tells a family that funded 1:1 support for their disabled child "just isn't realistic," I think about WIN Network. It's not a hypothetical ask. It's a working model, in this state, backed by real money and real evidence, solving a structurally identical problem in a different domain. The question isn't whether this kind of support is possible. It's why it hasn't been built here yet.