Our Village

Due to many barriers that show up for Black student Midwives, I received new visions that led me to move our organization away from a white supervisory model and into the hands of our own solutions. 

April 2017, Jamaa Birth Village hosted its first Community Baby Shower providing nourishing meals combined with pregnancy and childbirth education.

In April 2017, Jamaa Birth Village received its first major grant of $20k from March of Dimes to implement a Centering Pregnancy Program through our Midwifery Clinic.

In October of 2016, we celebrated our 1st annual gala! Many of our supporters, friends, and clients came to celebrate with us. The Brian Owens Band played tunes, while we enjoyed appetizers, stories, and gathering together in honor of the work that had started to grow vastly beyond my imagination.

Our Thursday Midwife clinic days were becoming increasingly popular. Women would drive across Illinois state lines to be seen for home birth Midwifery care, and we needed to find our own space to call home.

In April 2016, Jamaa Birth Village hosted St. Louis’s first Doula training and I co-taught a class of 13-new Doula students in my dining room over the course of 8-days.

The Midwife supervisor of the day arrived, and next thing you know, the sun was fully up, I had a sign on my backdoor to welcome our new clients, and excitingly, I saw the first car pull into the back parking lot. My heart jumped for joy, and visions of Africa flooded my memory. I just knew that Black pregnant women in my community, one day, would be alright. 

On October 26th, 2015, the state of Missouri formally recognized Jamaa Birth Village (formerly Community Birth & Wellness Center).

As I said my prayers and songs to the sea, preparing to leave Elmina, Ghana, the place of no return, where my ancestors were kidnapped, stolen and sold and carried to America, I regained one piece of what was lost in that horrible passage to this country, the vision and the gift to go back home, become a Midwife and build a birthing village, just like we had in my ancestral homeland. On the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, in Africa, a Fulani-American Midwife was born.