We are proud to announce that we have selected 67 Black and Indigenous midwives and midwifery students in the U.S. to receive our BFF+Baby Yams Watering the Seeds grant!

Birth Future Foundation is excited to announce our new grant making cycle, Watering the Seeds : Midwifery Careand Capacity Building Grant.

We are excited to announce our partnership with Baby Yams, a company launched by Tatyana Ali, who is supporting this grant with proceeds from the sales of baby quilts purchased on baby-yams.com . Baby Yams supports Black and Indigenous birth workers uniquely positioned to give us the care we need.

This grant will focus specifically on midwives and midwifery students. APPLICATIONS CLOSED ON SEPTEMBER 2

We are so happy to launch our partnership and collaboration with Baby Yams, a brand created by actress and activist Tatyana Ali. BFF and Baby Yams share a common goal to empower midwives and birthworkers with the resources to do what they do best, providing culturally concordant and liberating reproductive care. This collaboration strengthens our capacity and brings us closer to realizing our vision of liberation and abundance. Together, we’re better!

We are thrilled to mark the 7th annual Black Maternal Health Week by celebrating Black midwives past, present, and future. We fund Black midwives in the United States, and we want to tell you why this is a key aspect of our work at Birth Future Foundation.

We believe an investment in Black midwives is an investment in our collective liberation. 90% of our 2023 grants went to current and future Black midwives.

We are proud to announce that we have selected 50 midwives, students, and preceptors in the U.S. to receive our Tending to the Soil: Cultivating Community Care Grant!

We were overwhelmed by all the phenomenal individuals who applied or were nominated for our Tending to the Soil Grant. We are excited to announce that we are awarding $75,000 in total for this grant cycle, our largest fund to date!

Thank you! You spread the word, made nominations, applied, and donated. Every member of the BFF community shares in the success and impact of our grantmaking. Thank you for being part of it!

Tending to the Soil of Our Birth Future - Annual BFF Celebration
THURSDAY, DEC 7 at 8 PM Eastern on Zoom

SPECIAL GUEST: Midwife and Healing Facilitator Jamarah Amani will lead us through a meditation and grounding.

Please join us as we honor and celebrate the caregivers .. the midwives , midwifery students and preceptors that care for so many. Join us for self-care, community connection, and celebration!

This is the season of gathering and taking stock of what we have. It is the season of planning and preparation for the future. It is a time calling us to slow down, be still and think about the ways we can take better care of ourselves, our families and our communities as we inch closer to winter. The turning of the year has brought so much for so many of us, collective and individually.

We want to uplift the memory of our beloved friend and collaborator, Kirsten Kowalski-Lane, who died suddenly earlier this year. Kirsten was our “BFF,” one of the 9 co-founders of the Birth Future Foundation. Kirsten was a force of nature, bringing her honesty, curiosity, playfulness, creativity, tenacity, and fierce loyalty to bear on our collective work. She was a passionate midwife who was revolutionary in pioneering out-of-hospital birth centers in Massachusetts and has been dedicated to increasing midwifery access through her work with many advocacy organizations. We were proud of Kirsten when she stepped away from BFF to focus on her new birth center, Seven Sisters Midwifery and Birth Center in Northampton, Massachusetts. Kirsten, we have tremendous respect for you and your contributions to midwifery and to our community. We love you and we miss you dear friend.

Applications are now closed. Stay tuned for grant announcements in December. This is BFF’s biggest grant fund yet!

Birth Future Foundation is excited to announce our new grant making cycle, Tending to the Soil: Caring for the Caregiver and Cultivating Community. This grant will focus specifically on midwives, preceptors, and midwifery students. The intention of this grant is to water and pour into the amazing midwifery workforce, present and future. This grant will support the midwifery pipeline and nourish it. This grant is for practicing midwives who are taking care of birthing people, mothers, babies, families, and communities with all they have and all they are. We want to show our support to the midwives who choose to become preceptors and train the future of midwifery: the students. And lastly, we want to support midwifery students with fees for the NARM exam. Grants will range from $1,000-$1,500 per grantee.

We are asking you to help us by nominating practicing midwives and preceptors who deserve to be poured into, loved on, and shown some appreciation. Spread the word to midwifery students who you know who have taken the NARM in the last year, plan to take the NARM soon, or need to retake the exam. You can nominate yourself or someone else.

As BFF's executive director, I have had the opportunity to learn about so many inspiring organizations doing critical on-the-ground work to advance birthing justice. This Giving Tuesday, I want to share with you some wonderful community based organizations that I would encourage you to check out and support. Some of these organizations have received grants from BFF, others exceeded our capacity to grant this year, and all deserve abundance today and all year round.

Part of our mission at BFF is to uplift changemakers and birth justice leaders hard at work serving their communities, often without national recognition or fundraising teams to bring in resources. I hope you are inspired as we are by the creativity and skill of these wonderful groups.

We are thrilled to announce our second round of grants for 2022 and tell you about our phenomenal BFF Sustaining Birth Justice Grantees:

• Granny's Birth Initiative

• Mothers for Mothers Postpartum Justice

• Want to be Well Doula Services

• Chocolate Milk Cafe National Inc

• MAAME Inc (Mobilizing African American Mothers Empowerment)

• Naturally Nurtured Birth Services

At Birth Future Foundation we are committed to participatory grantmaking with those who are building our liberated birth future. A big thank you to our amazing grantmaking advisory committee Tanzye Hill, Cambreisha Montgomery, and RaShaunda Lugrand. And thank you to all our grassroots donors who power our Birth Future grants!

Our Fall 2022 event was held on Wednesday, November 16 at 8 PM Eastern on Zoom. We are so excited to celebrate BFF’s second year and to announce our fall Sustaining Birth Justice Grantees. We heard from grantees about their critical work in communities across the U.S. and we heard from grantmaking advisory committee members about BFF’s innovative approach to shifting power and resources.

*** RECORDING NOW AVAILABLE. ***

Thanks to all who celebrated with us on November 16!

We are thrilled to share with you our inaugural BFF Grantees:
Alabama Black Midwives Conference,
Birth Detroit,
Healthy Mothers Healthy Babies Coalition of Hawaii, and
Dr. Nadia English-Williams.

At Birth Future Foundation we are committed to participatory grantmaking with those who are building our liberated birth future. A big thank you to our amazing grantmaking advisory committee Jaqxun Darlin, CPM, Dr. Analena Hassberg, Maia Raynor, and Audra Post. And thank you to all our grassroots donors who power our Birth Future grants!

Our Spring 2022 event was held on Wednesday, May 11 at 8 PM Eastern on Zoom. We had a powerful panel discussion and announced our BFF inaugural grantees. RECORDING NOW AVAILABLE.

A BFF conversation with:
Tanzye Hill, Birth Manifesta,
Quatia Osorio, the Urban Perinatal Education Center,
Aisha Ralph, Taweret Midwifery,
Melissa Rose, Indigenous Women Rising, and
Moderated by BFF Executive Director Tanya Smith-Johnson.

The movement for our liberated birth future is powered by changemakers such as the folks we are highlighting for our Spring event. What does our birth future look like? What do the midwives and activists on the ground need? How do we achieve an inclusive future for midwifery? Thanks to all who envisioned with us on May 11.

Watch the recording and see the resources shared by our speakers.

Hello friends,

What an exciting time and moment we are in. Your BFFs have been busy and we want to update you on all that we have been up to and all that is to come. First, I want to say that stepping in as Birth Future Foundation’s first Executive Director is an honor. Trusting Black woman leadership is something we stand by and believe in, so we are walking our talk. I appreciate the belief in my abilities to steer us into the birth future we envision with an amazing team by my side. I could not have asked for a more perfect group to do this work with.

These past few months, we have been working hard to prepare for our first grant making cycle and developing our vision of participatory grant making. We have been doing lots of strategic planning and envisioning for the birth future that we want and we are excited to finally bring this work forward. So trust me things have been buzzing in the BFF world and there is so much more to come.

For Black History Month, we want to uplift midwifery and Black midwives past and present. Keep reading for some great articles and resources. We also want to highlight that NACPM is holding a webinar TODAY on the history of Black midwifery.

In solidarity,
Tanya Smith-Johnson, MS, CPM
Executive Director

Welcome Tanya Smith-Johnson, our new executive director!

Tanya Smith-Johnson is a co-founder of Birth Future Foundation and we could not be happier to have her step into the role of BFF's first Executive Director. Tanya is a midwife, strategist, doula, activist, and mother of 6. She is a dynamic, energetic, and passionate reproductive justice changemaker. Her work has impacted policy, clinical care, and movement building at the community, state, national, and global levels. Tanya also very recently became the newest president at the National College of Midwifery!

"I am honored to be able to do this liberatory work with an amazing group of women. BFF is the space where I as a Black woman have been uplifted and trusted to lead. I am thankful and look forward to leading us into the Birth Future we all deserve." - Tanya Smith-Johnson

BFF Annual Celebration Event 2021

Celebration and liberation with libations!
A community conversation about equitable grantmaking, the new BFF Giving Circle, midwifery, birth justice and more. Celebrating our liberated birth future! Watch the recording of our 1-hour December 16, 2021 virtual event.

Dear BFF Community,

We are excited to welcome the new folks who recently signed up for emails from Birth Future Foundation. Thank you for joining us in the work to achieve a liberated birth future with racially just and equitable access to midwifery care and the midwifery profession. (Learn more about BFF.)

At BFF, we are not replicating the conventional model of philanthropy. It has been a busy year as we build this new organization from scratch, leveraging our prior experience with midwifery funding while radically reimagining how every step of the process can be more equitable and racially just. In this newsletter, we are pleased to preview our grantmaking approach as we prepare to make our first grants. When it comes to fundraising, we are launching a traditional donor campaign as well as getting ready to pilot a BFF Giving Circle. We expect to continually iterate and improve BFF’s strategies and processes as we try new things, learn, and collect community input. Thank you for joining us for this journey.

A year ago, we formed the Birth Future Foundation, moved by a shared hope for liberation in birth and midwifery and belief that a new shift in grantmaking and philanthropy was necessary. We announced the birth of BFF in the midst of a pandemic and mass mobilization for racial justice across the country, and you were right there with us. Through the turmoil and trauma of the past year, we have found light and hope in our work at BFF. Our collaboration has been a treasured space of mutual joy, love, respect, and trust -- a rare thing in movements and organizations that seek to amplify birth and social justice.

It is time for midwifery and philanthropy to shift power and resources for sustainable, equitable progress. It’s time to shed old patterns of power hoarding and discrimination. We are part of a beautiful ecosystem of movement builders that *will* make the changes we need.

We are excited to share our vision and mission for BFF and update you on our work.

At BFF, we have been centering the theme of liberation since our founding less than a year ago, and recognize the resonance with this week’s theme “Claiming our Power, Resilience, and Liberation.” Liberation in birth is inextricably intertwined with liberation in all aspects of our society.

We love you.

We are already partway through February 2021, about a year into a pandemic, and a few months since launching the Birth Future Foundation. Whew! Through the ups and downs of this time, we draw inspiration and hope from our BFF community. Thank you for being with us on this journey as we make transformational change toward liberation and racial justice for birth and midwifery while reimagining the paradigm of philanthropy to shift power and build equitable partnerships.