In Mississippi, where families face persistent barriers to accessing healthy, affordable food, leaders are working to ensure that the earliest years of life are not defined by those gaps, but by opportunity. At the center of that effort is the Mississippi Early Learning Alliance (MELA), where executive director Biz Harris is helping bring together partners across sectors to strengthen early childhood systems, with nutrition emerging as a critical priority.
“We are the backbone for our prenatal-to-five policy coalition in Mississippi,” Harris said. “Our job is to bring people together, coordinate efforts and build trust across issue areas so we can create real systems change for families.”
A Growing Coalition with a Shared Vision
Through its coalition, now nearly 400 members strong, MELA works across childcare, maternal and child health, and economic security to align partners around a shared vision for Mississippi families. While the organization initially focused on early education, its work has intentionally expanded to include nutrition.
“Access to healthy, affordable, nutritious food, it just felt like a no-brainer,” Harris said. “It’s a building block for everything… for a baby’s body, their brain and their future.”
That shift is grounded in what MELA continues to hear directly from families. In rural communities especially, access remains a challenge, and even when programs like the Special Supplemental Nutrition Programs for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) are available, families don’t always have the support or information needed to fully benefit.
“Families love WIC. They know it’s important,” Harris explained. “And so, we want to ensure that more vendors can be WIC-authorized, especially in rural communities. Many of the same families rely on SNAP to feed their children. However, some of our regulations can make it challenging for them to enroll or stay enrolled, and many of our decision-makers don’t understand how critical these programs and how they increase access to healthy, affordable food are for babies.”
Shifting the Narrative and the Strategy
Rather than tackling nutrition in silos, MELA has focused on aligning partners and creating a shared, values-driven message across the state.
“We didn’t just write messaging and put it out there,” Harris said. “We built it with partners… and now we’re all using the same language. That’s how you change public will.”
This approach is already helping elevate key issues, from increased attention to the Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP) to advancing a proposed statewide nutrition commission. Just as importantly, it is helping reframe how policymakers understand nutrition programs.
“We’re trying to shift the perspective from these being ‘entitlement programs’ to being what they are: essential nutrition and health programs,” Harris said.
“This work is about making sure every family, no matter where they live, has access to the nutrition their children need to grow and thrive,” said Jammie Albert, the program director for Early Childhood Success at the Center for Municipal Strategies and Steering Committee member at the National Collaborative for Infants & Toddlers (NCIT). “By aligning partners and focusing on solutions, we’re building a stronger future for Mississippi, and creating a model for others can learn from.”
Strengthening Advocacy with Voices for Healthy Kids
Support from Voices for Healthy Kids, an initiative of the American Heart Association, has helped accelerate MELA’s ability to move this work forward in a more strategic and coordinated way. Through Voices for Healthy Kids, MELA strengthened how it communicates about nutrition, using tailored messaging frameworks to better connect with decision-makers and reflect the values of communities across Mississippi.
“We really dug into those archetypes from the Finding Commonalities and Solutions with Decision-Makers training as we were drafting our messaging,” Harris said. “It helped us think about how to talk about these issues in a way that connects with the values people already hold.”
Voices for Healthy Kids also provided critical thought partnership, helping MELA identify policy opportunities, better understand the broader nutrition landscape and connect its early childhood focus to larger systems and funding decisions. Harris pointed to Katie Bishop Kendrick, Voices for Healthy Kids’ national senior advocacy consultant, noting that she- was a key resource in that process.
“I’ve had several really great calls where she said, ‘Have you thought about this? Have you looked into this,” Harris said. “Those conversations helped us connect dots we hadn’t connected before.”
“They helped us think about SNAP and other programs not just as economic supports, but as nutrition strategies.”
That support has positioned MELA to not only engage in policy conversations, but to help shape them, ensuring that early childhood nutrition is consistently part of how Mississippi defines health, family well-being and long-term outcomes.
Looking Ahead
While policy change takes time, MELA is already seeing progress in stronger coordination, clearer messaging and increased alignment across partners and advocates.
“At the end of the day, if we’re about babies, we have to be about nutrition,” Harris said. “It’s a necessary building block.”
Looking ahead, MELA will continue working to expand access to healthy food, strengthen programs like Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and CACFP (Child and Adult Care Food Program), and ensure families, especially those in rural communities, are not left behind. Because in Mississippi, advancing early childhood outcomes means more than policy wins; it means building systems that support families from the very start. And as Harris and her partners continue this work, one thing is clear: when nutrition is prioritized early, the impact reaches far beyond the first years of life, shaping healthier futures for children, families and communities across the state. That support has positioned MELA to not only engage in policy conversations, but to help shape them, ensuring that early childhood nutrition is consistently part of how Mississippi defines health, family well-being and long-term outcomes.