JC: My first question for you is to just introduce yourself in any way that you would like, so name, pronouns, maybe your location or occupation and other identity markers that are important to you.
JA: Okay, my name is Jamarah Amani. I am a mother of four. I'm the executive director of
Southern Birth Justice Network. I am a licensed midwife. I'm the co-founder of
National Black Midwives Alliance and a founding member of the Queer and Trans Midwives Alliance. And my pronouns are she, her, queen, and sis.
JC: Lovely. So nice to meet you and hear of all your identities and the titles that you hold. Can you tell me where you call home? Where did you grow up? Where do you currently spend most of your nights?
JA: I've lived all over. I was born in Madison, Wisconsin. My parents were in the Black Power Movement. My mother was part of the Black Arts Movement. My father was a Black Panther. He was based in Milwaukee. And they met in a prison when my mother was doing arts work with political prisoners. So that shaped a lot of my childhood.
And when I was about two, we moved to D.C. So I was very young—I don't have a lot of memories of Wisconsin. And my mother went to law school. So we lived there during that time while she was in law school, and then when I was eight, we moved to California and the rest of my childhood was spent in the Bay Area in California. So that's where I mostly grew up. So when I think about where I'm from and the area that shaped me, even though I was born in Wisconsin, I would say I mostly identify with the Bay Area in California. And then the other layer I'll add to that is that I'm the first generation in seven generations that I know that was not born in Louisiana, so my family has deep Louisiana roots. And my mother and her family moved to Wisconsin as part of the Great Migration in the early 1960s. But as far as my family culture, identity, and roots, it's all Louisiana, New Orleans.
JC: Wow, that's super rich.
JA: It kind of spans many parts of this Turtle Island.
JC: Yes. You touched upon it a little bit when you were describing how your parents met, but I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit more about your home life. Did you grow up in a nuclear family structure? If yes, what did that look like? And if not, how was it different?
JA: I grew up in an extended family structure, so I was partially raised by my grandparents. My mom was a single mom for parts of my childhood. She was partnered when I was a teenager—she got married. So it looked like various things at different times. I also had a lot of cousins, aunties that raised me too.
JC: I'm wondering if you remember any elements of expansive care webs or maybe community building in your early life?
JA: Hmm. Well, I do remember being in church and that being a kind of expansive network of connected community… and a lot of children together on weekends and our parents kind of building support networks within that structure of like, ‘okay today I'll make dinner, you know, next week you watch the kids, they're sleeping at your house tonight.’ That kind of thing. And then, like I said, I had a lot of cousins, so I was always with them.
JC: Awesome. I'm wondering too if you had any earlier experiences that kind of led you to question or maybe feel disconnected from the nuclear family structure? I know you mentioned growing up in your own extended family network, but yeah I'm just wondering what things about that worked for you and what didn't?
JA: I think just seeing a lot of how my mother struggled as a single mom, and even the concept of ‘single mom’ being something that I think is very limiting and isolating. Like you're just supposed to figure it all out without a community and that just put a lot of pressure on her.
And when I had my own children, I was like, yeah, I'm definitely going to do this differently. Because we're not meant to parent alone. That's crazy that that's even a concept that's been created.
JC: Yeah, absolutely. Well, then I would love to talk more about what your care structures look like today. You kind of got into it, but yeah, if you can speak about what you were doing 20 years ago to plant the seeds and how those have developed and show up in your life now.
JA: When I was pregnant with my first, I was 19. I was in college. And I just remember being like, I'm definitely going to have to have a community to figure this out. And that was regardless of if I was pregnant or not, because I was at various times and I wasn't at other times. And I have four children. So even with my youngest, even when I was married, I think I felt even more like I needed community, because the idea that it's just supposed to be these two people raising all these kids without a village is just insane.
So I always had a sisterhood, and I lived in various places. Especially when I lived in Atlanta, I was part of the African-centered community there and part of the queer community, and those two communities really afforded me a lot because of the nature of the values. I think shared values and a kind of community ethic. There were a lot of co-ops and, you know, support groups and just more structure for people that were parenting to have support networks that were intentionally built around a shared set of values.
And then when I moved to Miami to become a midwife, I really tried to recreate that. Because I think in Atlanta, it already existed. When I moved to Miami, it was like, okay, this does not exist, so I'm going to have to build it. And we did. There were a lot of birth workers coming together, but also some of our clients, some, you know, other folks who were healers in the community. We all had children. Some of us were partnered, some of us were not. But either way, we all needed support. So we kind of had just, you know, group chats that would be like, hey, who's picking up the kids this weekend? You know, who's making dinner? And that definitely got me through midwifery school—I would not be a midwife if it was not for those support networks.
I worked during the day, and I took my call shifts at night and on the weekends. And I knew that I always had somebody to watch my kids evenings and weekends because I was a part of that network. So for me as a midwife, I've then been able to create community around what I received and benefited from. So to institutionalize it in a nonprofit—to create mutual aid programs and to connect moms together so that they can parent in community—that's something that's been very important to me because I know I wouldn't have gotten to where I am without that.
JC: That's beautiful. I love how full circle that is: you wanting to give what you received because it was so important to you.
JA: Yeah, and important to my children. They talk about it all the time. They're older now. They're 25, 19, 14, and 12. And all of them, but especially the older two, really talk about how much being parented in an intentional community affected them. And all the kids are still connected now. They have their own group. And when one of them is going through something, they all rally around each other.
JC: Yeah. That's so lovely.
JA: A lot of them are adults now or teenagers, so they have the opportunity to pass that on to the next generation.
JC: Absolutely. I heard you mention when you were talking about the intentional communities that were kind of built-in in places like Atlanta, having a shared value system really was the groundwork for a lot of that. Can you talk about, like, what were those personal values? What were the practices that were super central to the type of care that you were receiving then and also replicated when you went to Miami?
JA: Yeah. So I could say definitely holistic living, being close to nature, kind of consciously raising our children without a hyper focus on technology so that, you know… I always have this philosophy that if I can teach my children to think, they can learn anything. So I liked being around other parents who also had that same kind of approach where we're engaging with our kids and tasking them with things like, you know, ‘go identify these plants!’ or, you know, ‘come up with a recipe for this’ or ‘be creative, make a play!’
And my kids are super creative now. My oldest is a musician and a writer. And my second daughter is a poet. And the younger two are still finding their way, but they're into the creative side too—theater and dance, music. And I think that had a lot to do with being very young and being told, like ‘go outside and make up a game.’
So I think that was definitely part of the values. I think also [having] an African-centered perspective, so really like a big focus on Black history, on pride, on knowing who you are, especially in a society where they try to tell you that you're not worthy. So that was something that I think was very important to instill in them when they were younger. And when we lived in Atlanta, we were part of an African-centered homeschool collective and they went to the African-centered schools there. They're both nature-based schools. And they did a lot of project-based learning, a lot of Black history, a lot of science, creating projects around, like… I remember biofuels being a project that they did. Another one was building a Kilombo society, like a free society.
So being connected to other parents who thought in those ways was important to me. I think it was also rare, like, that wasn't the norm. So it did feel like, oh, we found each other. Like, this is a little bit of a gem here because if you go mainstream and your kids are in public school, it's going to be harder to find parents who think along those lines. So it was also just like this magnetizing force of really wanting to be in community with each other so that those values that they were learning could also be reflected in the community as well.
JC: Yeah that makes a lot of sense. How beautiful, like the alignment with other parents, with the schools, and with what y'all created intentionally with one another. I am very curious though about maybe some challenges that you faced doing family in that particular way? And how did you adapt to any of those challenges? I heard you mention that it felt very rare to even encounter other people like that—were there any other obstacles that you were facing as you were finding your people and then practicing some of these values that you just described?
JA: Yeah, I think the biggest challenges probably were navigating homophobia and transphobia. And that's why I said I was also part of the Black queer community. So it was sometimes this dichotomy of like, you know, there were a few of us who were in African-centered communities, which are more heteronormative, male dominated, and we were also in Black queer communities. There were a handful of us that were in both. But oftentimes it was like, okay, I'm going over here for this and I'm going over here for this, and it did feel like I had to split myself sometimes, but I do think that the few of us that had a shared African-centered perspective [and] holistic view of how we wanted to raise our children and also identified as queer were able to kind of build that bridge.
And for me that was a huge part of even the work that I do now: the foundations of Birth Justice, of making sure that we were always being queer and trans inclusive. And then as my children got older, my oldest came out as trans at 17, and so that's been a journey of even more so thinking about intentionally who do we surround ourselves with that's safe—culturally safe and emotionally safe for my kids to be around and the type of messaging they're getting, especially in a society that can be very hostile. And we live in Florida, so, you know, even more so.
JC: Absolutely. It doesn't make it easy, so it makes my heart warm to hear the ways that you are still being very intentional about the safety and well-being of yourself and your children. Did you have any kind of conflict management [strategies]? I know you mentioned feeling like sometimes you had to split yourself between these two spaces, whether it was the queer spaces or the Black ones. I'm wondering, even with the people who you felt like really understood you and embodied all parts of you, how did conflict management go or look like with your care web?
JA: So I was actually just talking about this the other day, of the siblinghood that grew in Miami—we called it our circle of light. That was what we affectionately called it. And we would literally sit in circles sometimes and build a bonfire and burn up some shit if we had to. And that was like if there was something going on between the kids. As they got older, as they got to their tween years and teen years, you know, those conflicts can get real catty. And so sometimes it was just like, ok, we're going to put this in the fire and we're going to leave this right here.
I also became a trained restorative justice facilitator for my work, but also really realized how much I ended up using it and have continued to use it in my family, and in my community and friend circles as well. So I'm often known as the mediator among my tribe. You know, people will call me up and be like, ‘hey, I'm having this issue with this person. Can you talk to them or can you talk to us?’ So I think I just gravitated to that role. And that's why I went to get training because I was like, okay... But I think I'm naturally kind of diplomatic, so people will often come to me for that, whether that be the kids or the adults. I've definitely had to mediate situations where it was like this homegirl is mad at this homegirl over this man. And we are just going to have to sit down and work this out together. And it's not gonna be pretty, and it's not gonna be perfect, but at the end of the day, we're family.
And then, going back to how it connects to my work, building an organization that is also centered around these types of principles like restorative justice and putting that into a daily practice, I think really means that we have the opportunity to build family. Because oftentimes I see Black organizations fall apart because of the lack of conflict resolution. And it's like conflict is inevitable. It's going to happen. It's not an if. It's just being prepared for it. How do we manage it? How do we continue to be our best selves in the midst of conflict? And then how do we recover from it? So putting a lot of healing practices into place and facilitating safety when it comes to communication has been something that has been very important to me in both my personal and professional life.
JC: Yeah, I love all of that. Thank you so much. I want to hear a little bit more about the kind of work that has come from all of these trainings and the organization that you've built. I feel like you touched on it before, about what really got you started wanting to build your non-profit and how you got involved, but yeah I'm wondering if you can give a more zoomed-out overview about what prompted you to get started, whether it was with midwifery or pursuing the [restorative] justice training and becoming a practitioner in that. It sounds like everything's connected, but if you could just talk about why you think that's important and why you got involved with it.
JA: Yeah, so going back to the beginning of birth justice, I was in Georgia and I was working in the Reproductive Justice movement, which was still actually pretty young. Like I remember being there when SisterSong was formed at the first SisterSong conference in 2003. And that was when I had just moved to Atlanta. So I was there when all of that was going on. And I was a young mom and I was very passionate about Black maternal health. Prior to moving to Atlanta, I had moved back to California, and I worked at an organization called Black Infant Health, which was all about preventing Black infant mortality, which was, I think, three times or two and a half times the rate of Black babies dying as whites in California at that time. And so that was the community work that I was doing.
So when I moved to Atlanta, I was like, oh, reproductive justice, this aligns, of course, the right to have children, the right to not have children. I think where I started to diverge from that a little bit was at the March for Women's Lives in 2004, which at that time was the largest march in U.S. history, and in the subsequent organizing leading up to that, we were pushing to say that reproductive justice includes more than abortion. It was such a fight against white women to be like we also have babies and our babies are dying and we're dying and we have rights around that too. And to be screaming that into what felt like a void just really propelled me to be really listening to this call to midwifery, like how can I actually make a difference.
I was never really interested in the medical field, but I was like, I want to be in the room as an advocate for when people are giving birth. And so that's what initially got me interested in midwifery. And it just became this stronger and stronger calling. So I became an apprentice midwife with Mama Sarahn, who is a midwife in the Atlanta community. She's been practicing midwifery as long as I've been alive. So over 40 years. And she accepted me as her apprentice. And from her, I learned how Black midwives have been organizing on the front lines. I learned about a lot of the institutional racism and oppression that Black midwives had to go up against, how they had to be underground because in Georgia, midwifery is not legal. Still today, home birth midwifery is not legal in Georgia. I learned about how to organize birth workers to come together, to be advocates. I learned so many things from her. And it helped me to understand that there needed to be a bridge between birth work and reproductive justice.
And so that's when I started building on this idea of birth justice. And I had heard the phrase as a legal term at an NAPW conference, National Advocates for Pregnant Women Conference. And I was like, okay, but how do we build that out to actually apply to community and to our organizing so that reproductive justice isn't just centered around abortion? And I'm doing all of this as a young mother, you know. And so then I moved to Miami to go to school to become a midwife, and I formed a group called Birth Workers of Color United. And we started teaching childbirth classes in a historically Black neighborhood called Overtown in Miami. And I was working with a shelter called Lotus House. And we started asking the women attending that class—it was about 15 to 20 Black women—we started asking them, what does it mean to birth with justice? And what does it mean to parent with justice? And the answers that they gave us, we recorded it, and then we created the Birth Justice framework from the voices of those women. And from there, we were like, okay, this is a whole movement. Like this is a whole movement, this is a whole branch of reproductive justice that needs to be its own movement. So we developed the Birth Justice 101 workshop. We organized marches and protests, classes and free midwifery care, free doula care, doula trainings. We went into schools, churches, street corners, like wherever we could to basically spread the gospel of birth justice.
That eventually led to forming Southern Birth Justice Network. One of my mentors, a Nicaraguan midwife named Ada Becky Sprouse, had an RV and she had this organization called Mobile Midwife. And she was delivering free midwifery care to Indigenous and migrant farm workers in the southern part of Miami. And she approached me and was like, you know, this work is too big for me, and I think it matches your vision. Will you take over this organization? And so that was how we became a nonprofit because she already had the nonprofit status. And so we were able to merge Mobile Midwife with birth justice and create Southern Birth Justice Network. And we still today have a program called Mobile Midwife where we deliver free midwifery care in an RV.
JC: How beautiful. I'm emotional listening. Yeah, that is so deeply intimate and profound. I love that you just kept responding to this call and people kept showing up to support the work and do it alongside you.
JA: I'm grateful for community because I definitely could not have done this work or built this organization alone. And like I said, we started as Birth Workers of Color United. We called ourselves ‘Bocu.’ But we were also connected to Mama Shafia Monroe, who had an organization called the International Center for Traditional Childbearing. And she's like, I call her the Queen Mother of the Black Midwife Movement because she was organizing Black midwives and Black doulas nationally. So we were able to actually connect to a national network and spread birth justice beyond Miami because of what our elders had built in terms of networks of midwives and doulas and being able to connect even globally, because she was even doing global work. And we've continued that—we have a program in East Africa where we go every year. And last year we took 15, no, 18 Black birth workers to Kenya and Zanzibar to volunteer, bring supplies, do a cultural exchange, learning exchange, to sit with elders and learn, to teach what we know. And it's just a beautiful experience every time. But those foundations and the idea even of a global Birth Justice movement came from what those elders had created at that time, so it's really just keeping the movement going.
In 2013, Mama Shafia said to me, we need a national professional association for Black midwives, and I think you're the person to do it. And I was like, huh? And it took me five years to figure it out, but in 2018, we founded the National Black Midwives Alliance, which is the first national professional association for Black midwives. And at the time, I couldn't believe that one had never existed, because we have such a strong legacy of Black midwifery in the United States, but oftentimes those associations that they did have were smaller, regional, or state-based. So we've never had a national association until, you know, seven years ago. So that was huge. But again, it came from one of my elders saying, we need this thing, go create this thing. It's like, okay! So I'm grateful for community, I’m grateful for the elders and ancestors that really made it possible for us to do what we're doing today.
JC: Ashé, that's a word. I felt that.
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PART 2JC: Just to take us back to where we left off last week, we spoke a lot about how that first meeting you invited a bunch of people and asked them what birthing with justice meant to them and you took exactly what they said and you made those the principles, these living core values of the organization. Is that a typical core practice in your organization, making those kinds of consensus-driven decisions or are there other practices that you see as part of the work that you guys do regularly?
JA: There's so much to how we create, and I feel very led and guided by my ancestors. Often the way that the creative process comes to me is through downloads, and oftentimes it comes in the form of art—visuals or poetry or film, you know, colors, nature, just in that creative space. And at SBJN, we tried to make it a practice to be in that space together. So sometimes we're getting collective downloads. And so I can give some examples of that: writing retreats where we're just co-creating and we're in ceremony together. And so what we build and what we create comes through those channels that open when you do ceremony. Another example I can think of is listening sessions where we call in community, ask a central question, and allow the conversations to unfold and walk away with sometimes a living document or some form of stream of consciousness to work with and mold into a collective manifesto.
Sometimes it's just me. I am kind of the thought leader at SBJN, so sometimes it's just me.
And I'll get this huge download and then I'll share it, vet it with our community—with our staff, with our 120 doulas that we've trained over the years, with our mamas and families, the midwives, and like I said, do these listening sessions where we're sharing something that may be at a draft stage, getting feedback and kind of molding it and crafting it.
I love the co-creative space—that to me is where the magic is. And I love production. So whether we're doing an event, whether we're making a film, which we've made several films over the years, just that collaborative and co-creative space. We've done a couple of murals here in Miami, and I can recall one that we did in 2023 where there were children and mamas and doulas and midwives and everybody did a piece of the mural. Everyone did a piece of it. And we had a central artist, and we stood in a circle and we gave this artist our vision and the themes that we wanted, you know, water and birthing and the midwife hands holding the mama. And this beautiful artist named Lisa Lee took that vision and created the central image of the mural but then we said well what else do we want on this mural? What symbols, what messaging? And so we brought everyone out and we were able to create Adinkra symbols and symbolism on the mural that was meaningful.
I think one of my favorite moments was there was a four-year-old who was one of our babies that we helped bring into the world who was up there painting—we lifted them up and they were painting on the mural and saying the name of the Adinkra symbol. And so that type of co-creation where it's the community doing it together is my favorite space because then everyone feels a sense of ownership of it, and it's like we're reclaiming public space, we're reclaiming the right to tell our own stories, to craft our own narratives, and it's to me it's an act of futuring.
I think that, you know, as Black folks sometimes we struggle with futuring because we're stuck in the statistics, we're stuck in the pathology, we're stuck in the morbidity. Which is real, so not to deny that space, because we gotta be real about where we are as a people. And, how do we move into the future in a way that can shift and change and conjure and craft a vision that we can bring into reality? And I think a lot of times we find that through art and writing and by learning how we apply our values to the work that we're doing. And the collective is the best place to do that.
JC: Yeah, how beautiful. I can hear how sacred that experience and doing that in community
is to you and probably so many other people. I'm wondering, because I feel like you spent a lot of time talking about the kind of emotional and spiritual work that makes this organization possible, could you talk about what else is part of that? Whether that's fiscally, physically, what has shaped the structure and the livelihood of this project?
JA: So, I could say from the beginning, fiscally, we didn't have nothing, you know, it was all love. We started as this collective called Birth Workers of Color United, which kind of merged or morphed into Mobile Midwife, we were called at the time. And that became Southern Birth Justice Network. But at that time, there were no paid staff. We were teaching childbirth classes in the pregnancy high schools, at the women's shelters, at community organizations. We were doing birth justice workshops wherever, [with] whatever spaces would bring us. And a lot of times I would go to conferences that would be like ‘oh we'll fly you in!’ Okay great because we don't have a budget. And [we] just tried to spread the word and it just built over time.
So SBJN, you know, as Mobile Midwife, which was our original name, was founded in 2008. We didn't have our first paid staff member until 2020. So it was many years of drought. I was a student midwife—I had many jobs: I did placentas and birth assisting and doula-ing and babysitting and whatever I could do, especially when my kids were young. And then later, in 2013, I became a licensed midwife and was able to work as a licensed midwife and funnel some of those resources to SBJN, so we were really self-funded for quite a while, because for a long time, there was funding for reproductive rights and justice, but there wasn't funding for birth justice. People didn't get it. You’d go to foundations like the Ms. Foundation or RWJF (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation), you know, these big foundations, and they just didn't get it. So if we did get grants, they were from very small community foundations, and they were like $5,000 or $10,000, you know, very small—not enough to pay someone a salary. Maybe enough to get, like, birth balls for a childbirth class or, you know, things like that, but not enough to pay someone a salary.
And I give a lot of respect to the Black Mamas Matter Alliance because I was part of the founding of that—I was in the room at the Mother House in Atlanta when we had those meetings where we said, people don't know Black women are dying. We gotta sound the alarm! We got to figure out how to get this disparity to be on people's minds. I think infant mortality was a conversation; maternal mortality really wasn't. And I was in the room like, ‘Birth justice! Birth justice! This is the channel!’ And when they were able to craft this national campaign around raising awareness around Black maternal mortality, it highlighted a lot of organizations that were grassroots, on the ground doing the work. That was around 2018, 2019, and it really did shift the funding landscape and bring more resources to the work. So like I said, around 2020 we also had, of course, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and COVID and the shift of white guilt towards funding more Black-led organizations. And that was a game changer too.
So all of that kind of crystallizing shifted the funding landscape to where it was like, okay, we have resources now where we can actually pay people to do the work instead of it being like a side hustle to whatever you were doing as your full-time. So that was a big shift. I would say also the scholarship that we created, like the Birth Justice Bill of Rights, the Black Midwives Model of Care, more recently Birth Justice Origins Project, which is an online archive of the story of birth justice [which] includes seven scholarly papers. That type of thought leadership along the way I think has contributed a lot to movement building and also to the identity of SBJN.
Another key element I would say is our commitment to restorative justice. My thing is always that conflict is inevitable. It's not a matter of if there's conflict, it's a matter of when. And the important thing is about how we navigate it and how we recover from it and how we stay in right relationship with each other. So there was a certain point, I think, between 2018 and 2020, when all of our staff, volunteers, everyone that was part of the organization got trained on restorative justice.
And that really became the core of how we relate to and operate with each other. And even as people have come and gone, and some people have come and gone and come again, you know, kind of cycled in and out of the organization, those values and those principles have really stayed. That's been really important.
Other elements of our work that have really amplified more recently since 2020, since there's been more resources, would be our mutual aid work. And we always had mutual aid work, but we didn't have a big pot of money to be able to do it. And so since that pot has grown, we've been able to establish the Mobile Midwife Clinic, which is the only nonprofit midwifery service in South Florida. So we're able to see clients on [a] sliding scale, many of them free. We're able to serve people that cannot afford midwife care or doula care. And we're able to do that in the community. So we have an RV—we started with an ambulance, that was our first vehicle. But that was old. [laughs] That was not a great vehicle. So we then got an RV. And now we've added a second RV that we're launching next month.
So we're able to take this care around, you know, to meet people where they're at, to go to housing projects and parks and shelters and churches and health fairs, you know, wherever people will let us park the RV and set up a little table. We take walk-ins and then we also do telehealth appointments to make it more accessible for folks. We give out blood pressure cuffs and dopplers and teach people how to use them so they can monitor their own health.
We connect people with other types of services: we believe in wraparound care and care coordination and warm handoffs. So we have trusted providers that we work with that do lactation, mental health, childbirth education, obstetric care. We have a nurse practitioner that works with us. So we have these different providers that we connect people with. Oh yeah, [and] acupuncturists, chiropractors, Reiki healers, herbalists, nutritionists. So we think of it kind of like an FQHC model (federally qualified health center), but from a nonprofit perspective, and it's more grassroots and justice-oriented.
And so that way we're able to have a birth justice model of care, which is something that we've created because we believe that the system that most people are accessing care in is not culturally aligned. And it also is full of abuse and toxic policies and people are dying unnecessarily in that system. And so our model is a life-saving model. It's a life-giving model. And it is a culturally-aligned model. And so many people will gravitate to us because they want Black and brown providers. They want services in languages that they understand. They want to be respected, and they want to be cared for with dignity and compassion.
JC: Yeah, absolutely.
JA: That's our mobile midwife clinic. We also have doula trainings. Like I mentioned, we've trained over 120 doulas. We just did our sixth cohort. So we can add 34 to that 120 now. But they're still in their training—training is nine months, so they're not fully trained yet, but they did their initial four-day training in January. So, yeah, over 150 now. And, you know, the goal with that is really a pipeline, rebuilding a workforce that was decimated by racism and capitalism and rebuilding it in a way that is community-centered and community-driven. So our doulas are Black and brown. They're from the community. They speak English, Spanish, and Creole, and African-American vernacular English. And we are who we serve, right? That is what we believe, is that we have to pull from the community, and bring those resources full circle to the community.
So this last training, the four-day training we did at the end of January, was in Overtown, which is a historically Black community where Birth Justice was founded. So definitely full circle in that way. And we partnered with organizations in Overtown, and that was very important. And for the first time, we had our daddy doula cohort—there are six cis men who are involved in the daddy doula cohort. And it's kind of a pilot: we're trying it out to see how we can activate Black cis men around birth justice and Black maternal health.
So, yeah, and then the last part that I'll just say is our policy work, our legislative policy work. We do have a statewide coalition: Florida Birth Justice Coalition. And two weeks ago, we did our birth justice day at the capitol. The capitol is far for us. We're in Miami [and] Tallahassee is about a seven-hour drive. So we had to get buses and, you know, get people loaded on the bus. There were mamas and babies and families and queer folks and trans folks, doulas and midwives and activists and community partners. There was about 40-something folks that went to Tallahassee and were able to spend the first day in community with each other learning about how to advocate and educate legislators, and then the next day at the capitol speaking to legislators about… you know really educating them, because most legislators don't even know the difference between a midwife and a doula, but yet they're voting on these things. So a lot of it is just education about what's a midwife, what's a doula, why is this important, here's some bills that you might want to look at, and this is our policy agenda.
So that work has been really special because SBJN from the beginning has been involved in legislative policy advocacy. Our first big project that we worked on with the ACLU back in 2011 and 2012 was the anti-shackling bill in Florida. And that was successful. We were able to get a law passed. We formed a coalition of 34 organizations. We were a really young, like I said, unfunded organization at the time, but we were able to form a coalition of 34 organizations to stand up and say, you know, shackling is wrong, it's dangerous, it's racist, and it should not exist anywhere.
And that passed in Florida. That was the first big win that we had. And then there was the Tammy Jackson Act. Tammy Jackson was a woman who was incarcerated while she was pregnant. And she gave birth on the jail cell floor because the prison staff ignored her when she said she was in labor and called for help for hours. Tammy Jackson is no longer alive, and it had
a lot to do with what she experienced.
And so we worked with Dignity Power to pass the Tammy Jackson Act and the Dignity for Incarcerated Women Act. And now there's a bill called Ava's Law, which is a catch and release bill, which says that if someone is arrested while they are pregnant, they should be released.
Once arranged, they should be released until they give birth and have an opportunity to recover postpartum and then return for either their trial or sentencing. We don't believe in this carceral system at all, we definitely believe in the abolitionist framework, however, we're trying to push for policies that at least improve the conditions of our people while we still work on abolition.
And so Ava's Law is something that we've been educating and advocating for for the past couple of years. And Ava's Law is named after baby Ava, who passed away due to preterm birth when her mother, Heaven, was arrested and put into a Gainesville jail. And, same thing as Tammy Jackson, or very similar, [she] was saying, you know, ‘I don't feel well, I'm having contractions,
having pains, take me to the hospital’ and [was] ignored for hours. And a preterm labor that could have been stopped was not able to be prevented, and the baby was too young to survive. So that's why Ava's Law is a bill that we are pushing for in Florida.
One more really key part of our work is our international work. We have a project in East Africa where we work with three sites, one in Nairobi, Kenya, one in Zanzibar, Tanzania, and one in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. And these three sites are led by Black midwives, and they are grassroots, they are community-oriented, and share many of our values. And so we've been working on building a global perspective that incorporates the African diaspora and the continent of Africa that elevates birth justice. And we do that [through] knowledge and cultural exchanges. So every year we take a group of Black birth workers from the U.S., we go to East Africa, we bring supplies, we teach workshops on topics that our sister sites ask us to prepare, and we go and visit village elder midwives to learn from the Indigenous African traditions of midwifery.
And so we're able to exchange culture and knowledge and history and skills with each other in ways that are invaluable. People come back from that trip completely changed. And I've been going… this will be my seventh year of traveling back and forth from East Africa. The relationships that we're able to build and the bridge that we're able to build which I really believe is a healing bridge because of our deep longing… I think as Black folks in the US we have a deep longing for the motherland. And so building this bridge between Black birth workers in the US and Black birth workers in East Africa, I believe it creates a sense of healing and connection and the ability to kind of fill in the gaps of culture and generational trauma and even language. Like when we learn Swahili, when we learn Indigenous languages in East Africa, we learn new perspectives of how to see the world, which are ancient perspectives, but they're new to us. And so I always say when we do this trip, we're also healing our ancestors. We're healing forwards and backwards.
JC: I love it. I love it.
JA: Those are the elements of what we do at SBJN.
JC: I love what you said about healing forwards and backwards. I think that's so important, and it just really reflects this holistic care I'm hearing you describe in all of the different programming that SBJN works toward.
JA: I did want to mention, because I said our hyper-local work, I said our statewide work, and I said international, but I skipped national. So our major national campaign is Black Midwives Day. We established a national holiday in honor of Black Midwives, and it's celebrated every year on March 14th. And so the policy work of that, the policy push, has been getting states to recognize Black Midwives Day, which I believe there's six now. And we did get a bill in the Senate, the U.S. Senate at the federal level, but it didn't pass because we know what's going on there. But Cory Booker and Gwen Moore introduced a bill to recognize Black Midwives Day. And the reason we want to have Black Midwives Day is for the legacy of Black Midwives to be recognized, but it's also a policy push to say that if we recognize Black Midwives Day with these resolutions that say this is what's needed to support Black Midwives—and the resolution’s language is very specific, so it talks about educational pathways, compensation, removing restrictive laws that limit midwives from practicing to their full scope, including abortion, right? And when those resolutions pass, we can then go back to those legislators and say, remember you said Black Midwives Day was important? Well, this is all that we need to honor and uplift and support Black midwives—it's all right there in the proclamation, so now let's pass another bill that says this and this and this and that. So it's kind of like giving the policy platform within the resolution, so that was the strategy of Black Midwives Day. So that's our national campaign. I did not want to forget that.
JC: Yeah, thank you for mentioning that. I'm curious how you landed in East Africa. What is it about the cities that you've been working with that made you say this is where we need to be going and this is who I want to be building these bridges with? What about these places or those people stuck out to you as a bridge and connection point?
JA: So I was an African studies major in college, Africana studies at UPenn. And so I did study Swahili in college, and I always had a fascination with East Africa. I always felt a really deep connection. But when I started traveling to Africa, it was always either for work or school. I was always looking for opportunities to go, and a lot of those opportunities didn't take me to East Africa. The first place I went was to South Africa. And I loved South Africa. Just, you know, what they've overcome, how they've been able to shift the apartheid policies that were so violent for so many years. And then I went to Rwanda, and I did HIV prevention work there and that was also a beautiful experience. And that was around the time that I was getting my feet wet in terms of thinking about birth work, and so I was inspired to keep exploring that and looking for opportunities.
I had a home birth family that's actually here in Miami, that's one of my clients—this was, you know, fast forward a few years later, so I think we're talking about 2018, 2019—and they actually have roots in Kenya. And so I was able to, through their connection, take a trip to Kenya, and I was invited to speak at a conference there. So I got to speak about this idea of the global vision of birth justice, and crazy things happened on that trip—I broke my ankle and you know, just like crazy things happened—but the type of community and connections and even instant family that I was able to make there was different than anything I had experienced in my other travels. So I was like, I have to come back here.
Then we had COVID, so there was a couple of years where I wasn't able to go. And then it just kept crystallizing… like I said downloads, like just something in that creative space. A funder actually connected me to a woman named Nafisa Jiddawi. She runs an organization in Zanzibar called Wajamama, and she was partially raised in the US, partially raised in Zanzibar— she's Zanzibari. And when we connected for the first time, again, instant family, even over zoom—we were still in COVID. It was just like instant family, sisterhood. And I was like, I have to go there. So I got a small group together—there were, I think, four of us—and we went to Zanzibar to visit Nafisa and Wajamama.
And from that trip, there was just all of this dreaming, you know, it was just this very, very, like I say, co-creative space. We made a mini documentary. We dreamed of doing all of these workshops, we did a mini doula training at the State University of Zanzibar there for the nursing program, and it just felt like we needed to keep working in that space together. And I think part of it was really listening to Nafisa and her team saying we want Black midwives to come here from the US, we need y'all to help us build what our vision is here.
So I started going there and also FreMo Birth Center in Kenya, which I had connected with from another midwife who knew the founder. And those relationships just kept growing and building. So I would say it really was relationship-based, like how I got there initially and how I kept building was very much relationship-driven.
And it did help that I had studied Swahili in college and, you know, I had always had this dream of going to both Kenya and Tanzania. Just absolutely fascinated with the history, the culture, the resilience, the resistance. There's just so many things to say about Kenyan people in particular and how they are building a grassroots movement for justice. And they are so tenacious, like they will not let it go. It reminds me of Palestine, you know, we often hear and think a lot about Palestine and we don't hear and think as much about the grassroots resistance movements that are going on across Africa, but being there and being able to see it and meeting young people who are involved in it and being able to be in solidarity is really one of the most meaningful experiences of my life.
JC: Thank you for sharing. That’s beautiful.
JA: Okay, so we've got questions in the chat. I don't know where to start either. Well, I guess I'll start at the end.
When I think about the vision for the world that I'm helping create, I think about
Birth Justice Futures, which is one of the seven papers that we just published for the Birth Justice Origins Project. So I'm going to pull it up, because I think I've already answered this formally and thought about it a lot and gotten input from folks. And so I think the world that I'm trying to create isn't just my world, right? It's collective. So I'd like to just share from that, if that's okay.
JC: Yes, of course.
JA: So Birth Justice Futures, it says, “What does a birth justice world look like? Simply put, birth justice is a mother’s and parent’s right to ensure our own and our baby’s well-being.
We envision a world where… Our babies are well, our families are thriving and we have full access to the tools and support needed to exercise our rights. It intersects with all aspects of our lives: social, political, economic, emotional, and spiritual. Birth justice recognizes that all peoples can birth and be parents and works toward a world where fertility care and choices are celebrated as part of reproductive freedom (whether preventing, achieving, or spacing pregnancies) free from stigma or exploitation by the medical-industrial complex.
We envision a world where… We are able to be in the bodies that hold us whole as sacred waters not parts. We are gathered in unity and respect for individuality. We speak truth to power in a symphony of support. We don’t need mirrors to see our souls because we reflect that in each other through the values of inclusion and justice. We decolonize our hearts and minds through community and connection. People of color, immigrant peoples, and LGBTQIA+ communities in particular have survived a history of trauma and oppression around our decisions to have and not have babies.
We envision a world where… Activism is our birthright. We believe that changing the landscape of bodies, reproduction and birth — locally, nationally and globally — is part of our legacy. There are many stories of birth justice; this particular one is foundational and seminal.
We advance the Birth Justice Framework to provide language that does not exist on a national platform at this time in the burgeoning movement advocating for access to midwives and doulas. We advocate for birthing rights as a justice issue. We demand medical racism and obstetric violence named as root causes of Black maternal and infant death. We are shifting stereotypical narratives of health disparities to conversations about the function of power in healthcare settings. We are connecting the intersections of race and gender as a lens through which to understand birth.
We are documenting the workforce decimation of Black and Indigenous midwives and healers. We are centering of LGBTQIA+ people in the work of birth justice. We are articulating Black cultural specificity and excellence as forms of ancient technology that saves lives. We embrace birth as a key part of our liberation story as oppressed people. We were not the first to say these things or even to write about them, however acknowledging the birth of birth justice means uplifting the first framework, workshops, curricula and grassroots organizations that have been consistently building this movement since 2009 utilizing the language, values, and praxis of birth justice.
We know that when we, mothers and parents, are empowered, our community is transformed. If we bring our babies into the world, with justice, in the natural way, without anyone telling us how to do it, then it nurtures our innate power as mothers and parents to create a free world for our children to play and learn and grow.
We envision a world where… Through our connections to the planet, the land and to nature. With the smiles of the youth as motivation, we activate our internal power to develop solutions to local and global challenges. We integrate healing and cultural wisdom into our daily lives. We free ourselves to the soundtrack of our children’s laughter.
Birth justice includes access to healthcare during the childbearing year that is holistic, humanistic, and culturally centered. This healthcare is across the pregnancy spectrum including: abortion, miscarriage, prenatal, birth, and postpartum care.
We envision a world where… There is a midwife on every block and a birth center in every hood. We are the healers we need and we build what we don’t have with what our ancestors taught us. We remember care in the ways of the ancients and we utilize the principle of Sankofa to bring forward that which we need now to actualize the fullness of our humanity. This care feels like the deep exhale after a warm group hug of loved ones.
Birth justice includes the right to choose whether or not to carry a pregnancy, to choose when, where, how, and with whom to birth, including access to traditional and indigenous healers, such as midwives and other birthworkers, and the right to breastfeeding support.
We envision a world where… Human milk flows like a river to all the babies who need it to grow. Support is everywhere and the air feels safe. We are full of joy and dancing as we excavate the ancestral narratives that liberate us. Our rights, stories, and dreams are reflected in the policies that govern our homes and our worlds. We remold the world with clay and love.
The complete range of pregnancy, labor, and birth options should be available to everyone as an integral part of Reproductive Justice. These are our rights as mothers and parents.
We envision a world where… There are no waiting rooms, no turning people away, and no inability to pay barriers that keep someone from the care they need. We embody life that creates consensually and exponentially unto itself. We live in a world where our lives are sacred and everything around us supports that reality.
We are creating a world where birthing people are honored, supported, and safe. A world where access to midwifery care is not an exception but the rule. A world where reproductive justice is not a privilege but a human right.
Birth justice is not just about policy or medical care—it is about power, autonomy, and the fundamental right to bring life into the world with dignity and joy. It is about ensuring that every person—regardless of race, gender, or identity—can birth in safety, in community, and surrounded by love.
Together, we are the architects of this future. We are the midwives of a new world.”
And then at the bottom, there is actually a recording of this. I think it's the third one down on the left is Birth Justice Futures. So we also did it as a meditation. So that is the world that we envision.
JC: Thank you. What a beautiful, concise, powerful, and clear vision and prayer for the future.
JA: Thank you and please check out the whole project.
JC: If you were going to give advice to someone starting or looking at getting involved in a collective care/mutual aid project, what would you say?
JA: I love that question because it makes me think about myself 20 years ago. And I think what has been able to keep me on this path and to deal with some of the challenges and barriers is to remember that we make the road by walking it. So oftentimes in this work, we're charting paths that don't exist, but we are guided! So keeping that connection with what motivates you, you know, your higher power, your spirit guides, your ancestors, your elders.
And as I said, when we were talking about East Africa, a lot of what has manifested for Southern Birth Justice Network, for myself, for this movement, has come through being in right relationship. And one thing I’ve learned is that relationships are currency. And we often feel that we don't have enough resources or money to get things done, and there's a scarcity mindset. But when we look around us and we see the richness of our relationships, we are so wealthy, and I really do believe—I know it probably sounds corny, but it's truly what I believe—that we can get anything done together.
And that is literally how it has happened, is sometimes I am voluntolding people. Sometimes they are voluntolding me. You know, like my elders would be like, ‘get this done, this is what we need to do.’ There are people who give what they can, right? Whether that be their volunteer time, a skill that they have, an artistic inspiration. And then there are people who, which is why I love the mutual aid model, because people give what they can and we're able to then harness all of that to give… I think about it like, you know, I grew up in the Baptist church, my grandmother was a pastor, so I think about the story of Jesus with the fishes and the bread. I don't know if you're familiar with that story, but it's like the more fish he gave out, the more fish there were at the end. He fed these multitudes of people and folks were like bro how did you do that? Like that's crazy, you had like three fishes! But that is how I feel about this work—we ain't got much, but somehow the little bit that we have has been able to build more and more and more.
I think also what I would say is patience and timing. The average career of a doula, when we did our research and estimated, is four years. The average career of a midwife is seven. A lot of people leave the profession due to… They still have the calling, right? And they still might resonate with it, but the staying power is hard. And some people come and go, come in and out. And so I think one of the things we have to do is build more staying power. And some of that comes with patience and timing, because we're often working in under-resourced ways and we're giving from a cup that really isn't full. And so we have to know how to continually fill our own cup so that we can continue to give. But some of that is about timing. It's like looking at the seed you planted and you don't see it coming up yet, but you just have to trust that it's coming and it's coming in the right time. Because I could have walked away from this organization and from this work many times, just because of financial challenges and the hardships that it can create from being on call as a single mother and navigating all of that.
And there's a piece of it that does involve trust, that's really just about trusting that if I take this step, there's going to be ground there for me to land on, even if I can't see it. And being in the collective and in community, there are times where, man, I remember the hard times that I went through where I was so out of it, I didn't know what was going to happen next. But every single time, community showed up for me. Every single time. And so my heart goes to people who don't feel like they have that type of community. And I also want to say that you have the right and the power to create it.
JC: Thank you. Thank you for your wisdom, your authenticity, everything that you've just brought today, last week, in the years in the past, the years to come. I can feel it through the screen, like the blessings that are over you and the power that you hold and the people that you carry with you as you're doing all of this.
JA: Thank you. I receive that. I receive that. Thank you for this interview. This was really fun and also felt very authentic. And I appreciate the energy that you put out as well to create the space that feels open and vulnerable and able to share in that way, so I'm grateful.
