The Nesting Doula Collective is adopting a 100% mutual aid budget funded by our community members.

We are looking for 500 monthly donors to sustain our work year round. As a grassroots collective, we don’t have access to grant funding and we provide all our services on a pay-what-you-can scale to remove barriers to access for the families we serve.

How will we spend $100k?

Doula Services - $30,000

Providing continuous, evidence-based, and culturally affirming support to BIPOC families through pregnancy, birth, and postpartum is the core of our work. Birth and postpartum clients can self-refer or be referred to our services by their care providers or community support workers to be matched with a trained BIPOC doula. Doula support reduces the rate of c-sections, medical interventions, birth and postpartum trauma and also increases overall satisfaction with birthing experiences as well as better long term outcomes for birth givers and newborns. 

Wrap-Around Care - $20,000

Birth doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Families have babies while navigating ongoing socio-economic barriers such as food insecurity, poverty, systemic and personal trauma, precarious housing, etc. We support our clients with wrap-around care outside of the medicalized parameters of perinatal care to ensure birth givers and their babies continue to feel supported during this major life transition. Our clients receive subsidized and pro-bono support with groceries, meal trains, counselling, acupuncture, herbal medicine, massage therapy, newborn supplies, lactation support, and more. 

Childbirth Education - $20,000

Knowing what to expect during birth and in the postpartum period is foundational to building confidence and empowering birth givers with information they need to make decisions and give informed consent. Fear of the unknown and deferring their agency to care providers can lead to birth trauma and negative experiences. BIPOC centered childbirth education prepares families to self-advocate and know their preferences.  

BIPOC Doula Training - $15,000

We are contributing to the resurgence of BIPOC birth work in communities across the province. Our birth and postpartum doula trainings bring birthing traditions and knowledge back to BIPOC communities and families. This builds health autonomy and promotes intergenerational healing. Birth has been a site of racist and colonial violence. By restoring and reconnecting to culturally affirming and traditional birthwork, racialized communities can practice health autonomy and healing justice. 

Autonomous Governance - $15,000

We have chosen an autonomous governance model outside of the non-profit or charitable models. As a collective of BIPOC women and femmes, we maintain our independence and agency by remaining rooted in grassroots organizing and mutual aid without dependency on paternalistic state-led approaches to governing community work. We are accountable to each other, the families we serve, and the communities that show up for our work. 

Help sustain our work by becoming a monthly donor!

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

The Nesting Doula Collective is a grassroots hub for cultural resurgence in birth and care work for Black, Indigenous, and racialized communities on the island. We provide pay-what-you-can and pro bono birth and postpartum doula services as well as childbirth education and doula training led by and for Black, Indigenous and people of colour (BIPOC).

As doulas we work within the health care system and not for the health care system. We are accountable to our communities and the families we serve and as a result of this autonomy, we are able to fill gaps that disproportionately impact birthing families that are racialized, working class, and targeted by intersecting forms of oppression.

Birth is at the heart of all of our communities. For Black, Indigenous and people of colour, birthing our babies and growing our families is an act of hope and resilience. We collectively work towards building a world that is safe for our children and their children. A world where they are not only free from violence and oppression, but are thriving in their relationships to self, culture, each other, and the land.

BIPOC birth work is essential to keep our traditions of carework alive in our communities, to identify and fill the gaps created by our systems and institutions, and to create the conditions for intergenerational healing. The impacts of culturally affirming and anti-oppressive birth work ripples out in all directions to benefit all members of our communities. 

Mutual aid is a voluntary exchange of resources and services with the belief that such exchanges mutually benefit everyone. It is a model of aid that recognizes what some community members need and what other community members can share.

Mutual aid distributes the responsibility of taking care of our communities among hundreds and thousands of people rather than creating dependency on a singular source of aid or a small group of people.

We all contribute to the wellbeing of others and we all benefit from our collective wellness and strengthened community. We successfully raised 100% of funds to provide birth doula support for the past two years through mutual aid. This has given us the courage to shift towards a community funded annual budget because we trust our community to show up for this important work. 

The dependence on non-profit organizations to meet our socio-economic needs created by decades of austerity measures by all levels of government has disproportionately harmed BIPOC families and communities. Decades of this practice has resulted in chronically underfunded and overworked organizations responsible for bearing the brunt of meeting the needs of communities and failing.

The charitable sector has also created systemic barriers for grassroots initiatives, and informal yet essential community networks from accessing funding, building power, and sustaining their work. The charitable and non-profit sector has invisiblized and undercompensated the labour of BIPOC women and femmes specifically. This is why we choose to remain autonomous and refrain from registering as a non-profit or charity. We do not depend on systems that have failed us. Period. 

Everyone should have access to the care and support they need during one of life’s most transformative moments. Pregnancy, birth, and postpartum have been removed from the community and heavily medicalized. For millennia, birthing families would receive care from friends and family without paying a price because these practices were rooted in a culture of community care. Urbanization, medicalization, and capitalism have made it difficult if not impossible for our loved ones to take care of us in the ways we need.

The burden of cost should not prevent families from accessing care and feeling empowered during their birth. Furthermore, we give families an opportunity to contribute to our work outside of a fee-for-service model. Many families will pass along baby supplies to future clients, some people who received our services will join a meal train for another postpartum person, families may not be able to pay for services upon receipt but can make a donation to our mutual aid campaign a year later. Care should never come at a cost.  

Because you always have. In the 5 years we have been doing our work, our community has shown up in every way we have needed. You have contributed funds, supplies, joined meal trains, provided pro-bono services, supported crisis intervention, helped find families housing, given people rides to their appointments, helped us strategize, referred people to our services, and celebrated our work. We trust that you are as bold and courageous in the face of injustice as we are and that you believe in this work.