Today we’d like to introduce you to Community Roots Midwife Collective
Hi Community Roots, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
Community Roots Midwife Collective (CRMC) is a group of heart-centered, committed midwives, healers, parents and community members who honor the sanctity and ceremony of birth. In 2019, CRMC formed as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit supporting the health and well-being of pregnant people, families and those of reproductive age, by providing compassionate, high quality, and comprehensive midwifery care, through community building, education, and healthcare services, while striving to increase midwifery access for all.
Midwives are trained professionals with expertise and skills in supporting pregnant people to maintain healthy pregnancies, facilitating optimal births and guiding recovery during the postpartum period. Midwifery is a person-centered, empowering model of healthcare that is utilized in all countries of the world that have the best maternal and infant outcomes. Midwifery care also supports improving the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being of people and families, a facet that is lacking in much of standard maternity care throughout the US.
CRMC has been offering care in the so-called Boulder County area since 2016, serving over 3,000 families by providing sliding-scale midwifery care, community classes and events, supporting newborn and family wellness through safe spaces to care for babies, and providing infant supplies. CRMC’s services include caring for families in the out-of-hospital setting during the prenatal, birth, postpartum and newborn periods alongside well-person care. Other programs are the Ancestral Womb & Postpartum Care program, lactation/infant feeding support circles (including a bilingual English/Spanish group), homebirth and other parenting classes, and low-intervention fertility care.
Our Ancestral Womb and Postpartum Care program is an Indigenous-led collaboration between CRMC, Harvest of All First Nations (HAFN), and Drylands Agroecology Research (DAR) that prioritizes Indigenous peoples from Colorado. Through this program, we offer traditional womb+body care that includes healing postpartum treatments (Cerrada de Caderas/Closing of Bones ceremony), culturally-preserving reproductive education for youth (Coming of Age and Moontime circles), elder-facilitated hands-on bodywork and herbal training, and communal care for Indigenous people of color throughout the Front Range and neighboring communities.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
CRMC sees the needs of maternity care as multifaceted in our community, and we are primed to improve maternal wellness in the state of Colorado through the lens of midwifery care which includes relationship-based continuity of care, equitable practices, and starting with low-intervention.
Some of the challenges we see in our community and face as a collective include:
-High rates of conventional medical intervention during pregnancy and birth, including cesarean births, leading to morbidity of parent/baby and or traumatic care+birth experiences. Poor outcomes are more common in our BIPOC and marginalized communities.
-Even though Colorado ranks mid- to average in safe birthing indicators, there is a significant racial wealth gap in Colorado across all measures impacting safe birth. Most importantly, education and access to healthcare are significant social determinants negatively impacting Colorado’s families in the perinatal period
-Limited access to out-of-hospital midwifery care: This issue spans from a general lack of community education about midwifery care+options, limited or no insurance reimbursement for registered midwives, to a limited amount of midwives, especially those representing marginalized communities
-Limited funding available for out-of-hospital midwifery care
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Our collective is unique in that we are able to offer all of our services on a sliding scale, relieving one of the biggest barriers to midwifery care: financial access. We work diligently to fundraise and craft grants throughout the year so that we can provide low-cost midwifery provision, free support groups, and community events. Our Ancestral Womb and Postpartum Care program is fully funded, which means we’re able to provide grant-supported postpartum ceremonies, earth-based community knowledge shares+teachings, and BIPOC youth coming-of-age- circles.
We’re honored and proud to have sponsored the creation of a beautiful mural in September 2024. Our dear friends+artists Juan Usubillaga and Mario Jose Olvera listened to our visions and generated a most profound piece, showing the importance of maternal and infant health within our community and beyond. The mural is earth-based, ancestrally inspired, and multicultural, honoring children + youth, water carriers, life bringers, and the sacred cycles of birth, death, and rebirth. These cycles of life are shared by all humans, and we believe that uplifting and celebrating the importance of wellness and care in these shared transitions is a powerful way to honor and unite our diverse communities (https://onechoart.com/https://mistermario.myportfolio.com/)
The crisis has affected us all in different ways. How has it affected you and any important lessons or epiphanies you can share with us?
Midwifery and community care have always been instrumental to the health and well-being of our people. This became increasingly evident during the pandemic, when birthing in the hospital had unique risks due to exposure. We trust that as we continue to build strong relationships with those we serve and our community partners, the impact of our work and the importance of our care will be seen and prioritized.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://midwifecollective.org
- Instagram: @midwife_collective
Image Credits
Lindsey Eden and Lauren Wright
