Labor, Love, and Leadership: Making Good on the Promise of Birth Equity

Webinar | June 15th, 2022

As the title conveys, Nashira Baril shares the story of bringing to life Neighborhood Birth Center (NBC), the first freestanding birth center in Boston. Nashira’s long-time supporters Drs. Craig Andrade and Lois McCloskey join in this conversation that is part reckoning with the structural barriers and part imagining the future. Like birth itself, bringing NBC to fruition has required the labor and love of many over years. This community-held vision has become a business plan, a board, and soon a building. This center will help return midwifery to the community, improving outcomes and experiences for all.

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Meet the Speakers

Nashira Baril (she/her), MPH,

a biracial Black woman, is the daughter and great-granddaughter of midwives, who birthed both of her children at home, and has experienced firsthand the transformative experience and liberation of midwifery support. She is leading the development of Neighborhood Birth Center, Boston’s first community birth center. With a master’s degree in Maternal and Child Health from BUSPH and nearly 20 years of experience designing and implementing public health strategies to advance racial equity, Nashira brings a structural analysis and somatic practice to her work. She co-founded and co-directs Birth Center Equity, a national strategy to expand community birth infrastructure by redirecting full spectrum capital to birth center leaders of color.

Lois McCloskey (she/her), MPH, DrPH

has been a leader of local and national maternal and child health care research and education for over 35 years. She currently serves as Chair ad Interim of the Department of Community Health and as Director of the Center of Excellence in Maternal and Child at BUSPH, a Center dedicated to the training of a diverse MCH workforce, ready to lead. Dr. McCloskey’s work is concerned with the racial and social inequities in maternal and infant health and the disconnects between the needs and desires of pregnant and parenting people and the services and policies intended to serve them.

Craig Andrade, RN, MPH, DrPH

is Associate Dean of Practice, Associate Professor in Community Health Sciences, and Director of the Activist Lab at BUSPH where he serves to catalyze and encourage SPH’s public health practice portfolio, promoting bold public health engagement locally and globally. Previously, Dr. Andrade was the Director of the Bureau of Family Health & Nutrition at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH). He also served as Director of the Division of Health Access at DPH, helped found the Racial Equity Leadership Team and Cross-Department Racial Equity Collaborative at DPH, and was Associate Dean of Health and Wellness and Director of Student Health Services at Wheaton College in Norton, MA.