In 2019, I founded Ezer Birth Collective after I walked through one my life’s major doors: the birth of my two children at home. I was utterly transformed by my births in 2016 and 2018, experiencing what I did not have language for then [a portal, a threshold, a becoming that necessitated many un-becomings]. At the time, I was an evangelical campus minister. Ezer came from the Hebrew words in the Torah, what Christians call the Old Testament, when God (YHWH) names woman at her creation: ezer kenegdo. That term had been weaponized in Christian circles as a subservient, gendered role in relation to men. Understanding its full meaning as strong warrior felt empowering to me at the time, and so Ezer was born- a reclamation of the truest nature of those birthing in their bodies. We served 40 families under that moniker, and experienced in our bodies the deep and sacred honor of accompanying people and families during their most vulnerable moments. And, as life would have it, birthwork would, devastatingly, lead to death work. I was initiated in the work of loss, grief, and anguish.

While Ezer was rooting and we learned the grooves of the work, I walked through a series of doors that left me almost unrecognizable to my former self: I left the Church in 2019, full-time ministry in 2020, and my marriage in 2021. The story of my faith shift began years prior, with the murder of Trayvon Martin, and Sandra Bland, and the white evangelical American church’s betrayal of some of its touted values. This undoing made room for the seedling of my queerness to poke just above the surface. I came out as bisexual, and then a lesbian, and then queer, and then trans-nonbinary. A familiar pipeline for some. Each door brought me to a threshold: facing the terror of the unknown, gripping desperately onto my former selves for stability and security, and somehow through love, community, poetry, walks around the lake, friendship with plant medicines, connecting with my breath and my body and turning my doula practice in on myself, I emerged anew. A truer, more whole version of myself. Scrubbed raw and fucking pissed at the violence of the Empire, hand over heart, committed to surrendering to each portal yet to come, and learning how to walk others through them all the while.

And so, here we are. Doors PVD, offering birth, death, and rebirth accompaniment. A gaggle of wounded-healers here to walk alongside you through all of life’s transitions. Are you standing at the threshold, feeling the tender push of Spirit at your back? Are you thrust into a vulnerability you’ve not yet known, terrified of what’s ahead and unsure how you’ll navigate it? We are here to help you find power in presence, and to connect with all of the healing possibilities right there, in your own body, and in the bodies of the collective.

+ Founder, E Corry Kole

Doors PVD is explicitly invested in Black and Indigenous sovereignty and liberation: we do so through gathering and redistributing micro-reparations, and being in ongoing relationships of accountability and mutuality in our community. Our reparations fund has been going strong since 2019, disbursing funds to Black, Brown, Indigenous and Queer birthworkers and organizations in our state or globally that are committed to co-creating a world we want to live in. We are an anti-Zionist organization, in solidarity with Palestinian parents and communities who have been violently assaulted by the US Empire’s funding of Israel’s unjust occupation. The ongoing genocide in Gaza is a reproductive justice crisis, with more than 15,000 children murdered, and conditions we cannot even fathom for birthing mothers and people under the atrocities of occupation and state violence. We reject anti-Semitism that would seek to characterize and dehumanize Jewish people, and stand in solidarity with Jewish Voices for Peace and their work in dismantling Zionist frames. Palestinian liberation is a cornerstone for all those who seek justice and freedom from oppressive systems, as Angela Davis has implored, it is a “moral litmus test for the world.” You can learn more from the legacies of Black radical feminisms here. Doors PVD is proudly trans-founded and LGBTQ+ affirming, while acknowledging that our most privileged intersections are the heaviest in the room, and that means an ongoing commitment to anti-racist systems change.