Welcome to Ezer Birth Collective.

I would like to tell you a story.

I was driving in my car on a sunny autumn day sometime in 2019 around my beloved neighborhood in the Southside of Providence, Rhode Island. I was chatting with God about our city, our friends, this unshakeable feeling I had that I should probably become a birth doula.

All at once, I sensed this concept download into my brain and my spirit. An idea about a collective of women offering birth and grief services grounded in God’s presence. It would incorporate some way to practically impact the unjust birth outcomes we were seeing firsthand in our city, in the wake of the completely preventable death of Lashonda Hazard. She was a healthy, black mother, pregnant. Admitted with stomach pains, she continued to update her Facebook feed on the lack of care she was receiving at Women & Infants Hospital. On January 7, 2019 she and her unborn baby died.

Lord, have mercy.

In some ways, Ezer Birth Collective is my tribute to her.

I have my gracious friend Carla, and her sister Lixis, to thank, who not only tolerated, but dreamt with me about what we could actually do to provide moms and babies with adequate care. We went through a few iterations of this idea, and ultimately arrived at a multi-pronged approach. There are already a profound number of women of color leading the charge to close racist birth outcomes in our state. They do not need more white women adding to the noise, more likely they need us to get out of the way.

In my years as a faith-leader, I have studied the racist movements of white Christian missionaries over the centuries, often eager to “help” but completely amiss in their blind spots to their own colonial ways of thinking. They consistently centered their own stories to provide help that often times was neither needed nor productive. They ignored indigenous leadership already on the ground. They shamed non-white practices as inferior.

Lord, have mercy.

I wanted to learn from their mistakes.

Ezer Birth Collective is aimed at stewarding our resources as white women to provide practical, financial support for Black, Brown, Indigenous and Queer doulas and midwives— the leaders already doing this work who could use an occasional $500, $250, $700 gift in their GoFundMe towards their certifications, professional headshots, their grocery budget, a pedicure— I don’t care how the money is used and it is not mine to control or monitor. I call our 50-50 funding model a “Reparations Funding Model,” because that’s precisely what it is. One white woman, and better yet, a growing network of white women’s, attempt to offer financial compensation for the deeply racist and deeply painful history of enslaved Black women who were forced to nurse white babies at the expense of their own, raped by white slaveowners and founded the modern gynecology movement with no consent.

Here I must confess my own hypocrisy. I spent years waving my flag of “white wokeness” with little actual impact. I weaponized my newfound racial consciousness against my white peers and I considered myself an activist without actually helping change any policies impacting marginalized folx. God has been lovingly and ruthlessly keeping me honest. When I was pregnant with my son, Cedar James, my white husband and I arrived at his name as a reflection of the season we sensed God birthing in us. Cedar refers to “God’s trees,” lovingly planted with deep roots, a picture of God’s abundance and delight. James, the writer of that tiny, power-packed book in the New Testament strongly urged us to become doers of the Word. As my husband, Chris, and I have been on an intellectual and academic journey of deconstructing the ways white supremacy has infected us, we sensed that with Cedar’s birth it was time for these ideas to become embodied.

Ezer Birth Collective is one small part of that.

We offer faith-based services to mothers in our area who are more likely to hire and be able to afford doula services while they are not yet reimbursable by insurance. We hope you’ll be compelled by our mission and understand what stewarding $1200 of your income will mean. We will then split every payment at least in half and fund whatever projects our friends of color would like funded.

I love, love, love when God can fill up a pregnant (or a grieving) woman’s experience. I love hosting Christ’s presence and providing crucial information to help you become an empowered participant of your own birth. And I am so excited to be able to highlight the true warriors and heroes already at work in our cities.

So, welcome.

Take time to browse, pass this along to friends as you see fit, and prayerfully join me in creating a future in which birthing white babies economically benefits those who are birthing Black and Brown babies, creating Kingdom like equity where we are so deeply in need of true repentance.

Here’s to imperfect projects, and a lot of heart.

Erin