A Wisconsin program designed to reduce perinatal health racial disparities received a major funding blow this week, and will be discontinued after this year.

The program, called the Milwaukee Healthy Beginnings Project (MHBP) and run by the Black Health Coalition of Wisconsin, was launched in 1998. MHBP had been funded through a federal grant as part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Healthy Start Initiative, which aims to reduce the nation’s infant mortality rate, in part through funding community-based programs.

A recent report found that in Milwaukee, about 10 of every 1,000 babies born between 2009 and 2011 died within their first year of life. The problem is even worse for children of color: The infant mortality rate for Black babies is three times that for white babies, and more than twice as high as the national average overall.

A more recent city report found that between 2010 and 2012, the infant mortality rate was 9.6 babies for every 1,000, a record low.

“At a time when Milwaukee needs additional resources to tackle the complex and important issue of infant mortality,” Democratic Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett said in a statement, “the loss of this funding is a significant setback to the efforts to ensure that more infants are born healthy and live to celebrate their first birthdays.”

According to the Black Health Coalition of Wisconsin’s website, MHBP “offered an array of services … including outreach and enrollment; targeted prenatal and interconceptional case management, fatherhood case management and peer community education, health education, mental health services, domestic violence services, AODA services, breastfeeding education and support.”

Another Wisconsin organization that was a Healthy Start grant recipient, the Great Lakes Inter-Tribal Agency, also did not have its grant renewed.