Our Motivation and Process

We created this landscape analysis because as birth justice began to see significant attention and growth over the past few years, we worried.

Heightened attention has opened new pathways for engagement with and investment in birth justice work, but the ensuing flow of resources has not been evenly distributed, nor has it been clear that funding intended to do “birth justice” work has flowed to those genuinely aligned with birth justice values. (In fact, one could ask: what is birth justice?) As a result, some of us have scaled up and experienced transformational growth, but many among us remain unseen and unsupported.

On a mission to counteract this disparity equipped with definition and clarity, we set out to map the birth justice landscape. To paint a picture of the who, what, when, where, how, and why of birth justice in the United States, we assembled a team, rustled up funding from partners, and launched several prongs for investigation and feedback:

  • Project Team

    We convened a project team of five to do research, analysis, writing, reviewing, editing, and project management.

  • Community Partners

    We convened a group of 7 community partners to advise, conduct outreach, review, and be in conversation with our work as it took shape.

  • Murmurations

    We hosted a 5-week series of virtual community meetings, called “murmurations,” which were attended by a diverse group of people from across the country.

  • Survey

    We designed and disseminated a survey to thousands of contacts and received 363 responses.

  • Interviews

    We developed a list of potential interviewees, contacted dozens, and conducted 30 interviews.

Our team labored over the course of a year to make meaning from the resulting data, and now we endeavor to present it back to you, and back to ourselves. We offer this landscape analysis, first and foremost, to funders, to help direct the windfall of support so that it can be equitable and effective. Along the way, we came to understand that this project has also been a chance to reflect on ourselves, to engage in some of the difficult conversations and begin to answer some of the difficult questions about who we are, what we envision, and how we can get there. In the end, we hope we can all embrace this landscape analysis as an opportunity and a tool for working more strategically together for the sustainability and success of birth justice.

Knowing we reached only a fraction of those in movement with this first iteration of the landscape analysis, and that this work is constantly evolving, we intend to continue this listening work.

About Elephant Circle

Founded in 2009, Elephant Circle has taken a “landscape analysis” approach to our birth justice work from the beginning. Our goal has been to understand the legal system, health system, and perinatal period together in order to diagnose the obvious problems and design targeted solutions. We bring an intersectional, feminist, reproductive justice, design thinking approach to birth justice, and each of these modalities informs our praxis, which is an iterative conversation between communities, systems, and power with the goal of a just distribution of power and resources.

Our work is organized into three interwoven areas that come together to address the disconnection and exposure to harm that people experience in the perinatal period:

  • Community Power

  • Public Health Law and Advocacy and

  • Movement Building

Through this work, we do everything from direct service to policy change work and interact with and support people across the landscape: birthing families, care providers of all credentials, researchers, artists, economists, policymakers, entrepreneurs, and beyond.

We’ve been inspired by Ella Baker’s concentric circles approach; listening is built into our root system. Over the 15 years Elephant Circle has existed, we have expanded the reach and scope of our listening circles, which have included national equity in midwifery work (which grew out of the end of the Division of Access and Equity at MANA), national and international perinatal accountability work (like the OCR legal brief and Birth Rights resource), and a birth worker of color survey developed in collaboration with the National Association to Advance Black Birth and the National Black Midwives Association, with support from Groundswell Fund’s Birth Justice Fund.

Our decision to embark on a landscape analysis grew out of the realization that we were already doing deep listening work upon which we could build and share back with the field. In conjunction with this landscape analysis, we have also been working on a forthcoming Indigenous mapping project (to visualize community strengths related to sovereign birth), the Anarcha Project (growing out of our Brooklyn-based Safer Childbirth Cities Project), and the People’s Tribunals in New York and Memphis (a duo of community events honoring the stories of 24 survivors of obstetric racism and violence). 

The love we have grown through such work, and the love we hold for our partners and colleagues, created a strong foundation for this bold endeavor. Indeed, we have considered this project our love letter to the movement.