Prenatal Care Program Is Labor of Love : Retired Nurse Hopes to Expand Project to Lower Black Infant Mortality Rate

Everything, it seems, is a family affair to Zola Jones.

For more than 30 years, families have been her career. A public health nurse since 1961, Jones retired last fall as family planning specialist for Los Angeles County’s Department of Public Health. But that doesn’t mean she has stopped working.

Retirement means she can spend more time on Great Beginnings for Black Babies, which she co-founded in 1990. The Crenshaw-based, volunteer-run prenatal care campaign is designed to stop the spiraling infant mortality rate among African Americans.

Jones volunteers most of her time to making Great Beginnings bigger, more financially secure and accessible to more women.

“I used to get up at 4:30 a.m. to be at work by 6 a.m. and go for 12 or 14 hours because I was also trying to get Great Beginnings started,” she said. “Now I get up a little bit later.”

The 56-year-old woman with a passion for family has never been married and has no children.

She’s a favorite aunt, the one who sneaked you extra cookies when Mom wasn’t looking. Her brown eyes magnified by owl-rimmed glasses, Jones rarely speaks first and always says “we did” rather than “I did.” She smiles widely and often and laughs generously, her shoulders shaking as if she’s been seized by a sneeze.

“I’ve always looked to Zola as the impeccable warrior,” said Caswell A. Evans Jr., of the county Department of Health Services, in a speech at an appreciation dinner recently to honor Jones’ decades of work in public health. “She is a person with a fire in the belly and a vision in the eye.”

Since her retirement, that vision is sharply focused on one thing: “If everything could be right in the world,” Jones said, “everybody would have prenatal care. There would be no barriers for women to get help, and every baby would have the chance to be born healthy.”

Many children don’t have that chance. California’s infant mortality rate hovers at nearly 7%, Department of Health Services statistics show, but the rate for black babies is more than 16%.

Great Beginnings, offered in collaboration with Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital in Inglewood, gives pregnant women the information they need to keep themselves and their babies healthy. They are taught not to drink, smoke or take drugs when pregnant and are given information on nutrition, exercise and basic anatomy.

“Our goal is to see Great Beginnings connected with all the major hospitals,” Jones said from her bare-walled office at the clinic’s new Hawthorne facility that still has chalky dust and the smell of new carpet in the air.

County and state health care experts say Great Beginnings has made a difference in public awareness. They point to Jones’ subtle way of connecting the right people as a cornerstone of the program’s success.

“She knows . . . all those things one needs to get a major task done,” said Great Beginnings co-founder Dr. Virginia Hunt. “She doesn’t quit until it is finished.”

“Zola has always been at the forefront in maintaining quality care in family planning,” said Geri Nibbs, a nurse consultant for the state Department of Health Services who has known Jones for 15 years. “She has a way of pulling people behind her.”

The youngest of eight children, Jones was 12 when her mother died. She was raised by her father, who worked in a sawmill near Marion, Ala.

Life wasn’t easy for this quiet girl who liked to read. But buoyed by love and faith and money from brothers and sisters, extended family, friends, neighbors and church, Jones received a nursing diploma from Grady Memorial Hospital School of Nursing in Atlanta. Later, she earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in nursing and public administration from Cal State Los Angeles.

She started nursing in a newborn nursery in a Cleveland hospital because she loved the tiny patients. They were cute and they didn’t complain, she said.

But after one bitter winter, Jones followed friends west to warmer climes. She made her home first in Long Beach and then Hawthorne, devoting her off-duty energies to the nursing sorority Chi Eta Phi, the Council of Black Nurses and the Nurses Guild at Messiah Baptist Church in the Crenshaw district.

“I want to give something back,” she said. “I have always just thought I wanted to help.”

“Infant mortality is a major problem throughout the nation,” Jones added, “but like Martin Luther King said, ‘We shall overcome.’ ”